At Safeway, they match photos of Cheerios to the actual boxes. At the jobs center, they label cell phone boxes. Younger children are taken to an elementary school, to sit with their peers during music. The teaching tools at Cedar Lane are not Shakespeare, not even Seuss. Those skills are expensive to teach.
Special education is a huge factor in the mammoth growth of the cost of public education.
Costs cannot be considered as a factor. Most counties in the area have at least one public school for the severely disabled, some have several, and a few use special wings of regular schools. In Howard County, parents have chosen Cedar Lane for their children instead of a neighborhood school. That progress can be measured in the simplest of interactions. At lunch, most students eat at tables, while a couple of dozen sit in wheelchairs, fed through tubes that white-smocked nurses snake under their clothes and snap into their bellies.