When he recently met with state legislators, Mayor Bloomberg presented a statistic in an attempt to reduce spending on children with special needs - that NYC spends $100 million for 4,000 students with special needs to attend private schools when the public schools are incapable of addressing their needs. Bloomberg proposes that these students should be required to try the public schools before going to private school and pursuing legal action. Well, the U.S. Supreme Court does not agree with him. In a recent decision, the Supreme Court concluded that a student with special education needs does not have to have been enrolled in public school in order to enroll in a special education private school and obtain funding for the cost of the program. Bloomberg went further, saying "We can provide services to those students at a fraction of that cost." But he neglects the part about these services having to be appropriate to meet the students needs and if it truly were the case that the public school could meet the needs of the children who are currently in special education private schools, we wouldn't be where we are. Bloomberg needs to spend the money on reforming the public school system first. Then let him come back and make this argument.