Saving money on public education is like saving money by using your credit card. You’ve still got plenty of cash for other things, and that minimum monthly payment is not really a problem.
Until it is.
Public education, especially those aspects of public education that require the additional services of specifically trained specialist teachers, cost a little extra. But neglecting the provision of those remedial services to children while they are still in school is comparable to those credit expenditures. Pay now or pay later, but someone will have to pay up — and with interest — sooner or later.
That’s exactly the way it is with the public school system’s need to do more for kids with learning disabilities.
A 2011 Ministry of Education document offers a general definition: “Learning disabilities refer to a number of conditions that might affect the acquisition, organization, retention, understanding, or use of verbal or nonverbal information.”
These disorders, according to experts in the field, affect language processing, memory, attention, and “executive” functions such as planning and decision-making.
Learning disabilities can also involve difficulties with organizational skills, social perception, social interaction and perspective-taking.
Most learning disabilities are lifelong, but with early intervention, adults with such disabilities can learn to compensate effectively and lead productive lives.
The irony is that, at least in the early school-age stages of an individual’s life, these interventions are relatively inexpensive compared to the long-term costs of no remediation.
Basic arithmetic indicates that saving money in the classroom through inadequate specialist staffing or teacher training is, like that credit card, simply deferring costs for a bigger hit on the taxpayer’s pocket in the future.
Research by the Learning Disabilities Association of Canada estimates the average annual cost of adult learning disabilities to the taxpayer is about $707 billion. That figure is arrived at by tallying long-term direct costs that include a variety of health and social services, medications, criminal-justice services and unemployability costs such as income transfers, including employment insurance, workers’ compensation and provincial welfare.
The cost of not providing adequate remedial support during an individual’s public-school career far exceeds what it might have cost to provide those services.
The Learning Disabilities Association of Vancouver reports that 35 per cent of students identified with a learning disability drop out of high school, twice the rate of non-disabled peers, and up to 70 per cent of inmates in Canadian prisons are learning disabled.
A 2014 news article quotes a report from Correctional Services of Canada that estimated the cost in Canada of one year of incarceration for one person is $117,788, up 46 per cent from a decade ago.
Assuming that a teacher specializing in the treatment of learning disabilities has a post-graduate degree and 10 years experience dealing with learning disabilities, the cost would be less than $100,000 per year, including salary and benefits.
That teacher would likely be providing support for several learning-disabled children across several grades — sometimes in more than one school.
Supporting the Learning Disabled Child in Canadian Schools, a 2016 paper by Kate Raven, executive director of the Learning Disabilities Association of Vancouver, suggests that more than 12 per cent of all Canadians (more than three million people) have some kind of learning disability.
The Vancouver association reports that 43 per cent of people with learning disabilities live at or below the poverty line.
Barbara Arrowsmith-Young, the author of the international bestseller The Woman Who Changed Her Brain, writes that: “Youth who struggle with learning disabilities become adults with learning disabilities, who [in turn] are over-represented in many marginalized populations, and more vulnerable to risk-taking behaviour and mental-health issues than those without …. The true cost, medically and socially, may be impossible.”
And that becomes a whole other problem.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
