Benson has introduced a special education reform bill that works towards identifying administrative efficiencies and cost savings for schools districts, while providing more consistency for special education students with high needs. The bill proposes tying funding to students rather than school districts. “Our current special education funding system is overly complicated and is problematic to both school districts and children,” said Benson. “I proposed a system for tying funding to students rather than school districts during my campaign and this legislation is the first step toward achieving that goal.”
This makes so much sense, it hurts my head. This would solve that constant problem for districts who happen to have a lot of special needs children proportional to their student population – funding for those sources winds up being carried by the local revenues because that funding is set per district. This adversely affects special education – often, a good public school special ed program will entice parents of a special needs child to move to the district, increasing the budgetary burden, but with no additional help from the state. That means the program will likely degrade in response. We shouldn’t punish districts with better programs.
The second one is near and dear to my heart, an environmental no-brainer.
Benson’s environmental protection bill will require customers to pay a surcharge of five cents for each plastic bag used at grocery stores. Customers would pay no surcharge for paper bags, reusable bags, or plastic bags brought from home. The surcharge would go to the Clean Environment Fund to be used for environmental projects. “Plastic bag surcharges have been shown to produce real benefits to the environment, reducing plastic waste and greenhouse gas emissions,” said Benson.
Boo ya! Ireland did this and it’s virtually a no-plastic-bag zone now.
Two great no brainer practical solutions to two big problems. Thanks, Representative Benson! High marks.
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p>2. Then, also, have a sample letter for each bill, post them here, e-mail them to all your friends, and get us to send letters supporting these two bills. yes, this makes a difference.
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p>3. Ask us to ask our own legislators to make these bills a priority.
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p>4. Make sure Benson knows you want to know when these bills are up for hearing, and post and publicize the hearings. Help Benson locate “poster families” to testify at the hearing – I can do some of that for the special ed bill which I love and would like to read [post the link HERE or send it to me] once you have it. I am fairly active in the special education community in multiple ways.
Great idea by Rep. Benson on the plastic bag, but sounded kind of familiar to me, so I did a quick search and sure enough, it’s not a very original idea:
http://wbztv.com/local/plastic…
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p>A simple search by her or her staff in researching this issue would have turned up the fact that Senator Brian Joyce filed an almost identical bill last session. I would hold off on calling her the coolest freshmen legislator, and it’s definitely not cool to copy/steal another legislator’s ideas.
Or is this bill still needed? Your linked article doesn’t tell us.
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p>That said, I’m in favor of taking progress where we can get it – the diarist noted that this idea was tried in Ireland where it’s reported to have worked quite well, so everyone knows this is someone else’s idea, including Brian Joyce. I don’t think it should be looked at as copying or stealing – I like it because it’s a good, progressive idea, let’s work to make it law.
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p>The 37th Middlesex District includes
* Acton – Precincts 3, 4 and 5
* Boxborough
* Harvard
* Lancaster – Precinct 1
* Lunenburg
* Shirley
Her banner image is too wide, forcing me to horizontal scroll.
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p>Cool kids have width-appropriate banners. Just sayin’
Hannaford will pay you a coupla cents for every canvas bag you use. Personally, they’ve been many times that I use no bag at all…the car’s parked right outside, and I have some sort of bag with me anyway. What recompense do I get? Nada.
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p>That’s just messed up.
I’m glad to see Jen Benson carrying the progressive fire from Jamie Eldridge’s former seat – great news, thanks! I’ll contact my rep about both of these bills.
The key with the bags issue is not to make it a landfill issue or an oil/carbon emissions issue. Here’s why:
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p>Landfill: The percentage of landfill that’s occupied by plastic bags is fractions of fractions of a percent. Plastic bags just aren’t very big.
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p>Oil/carbon: While plastic bags are made directly from oil, it takes more oil to get the bags where they’re going. Since paper bags are much bigger than plastic bags, it takes more oil to deliver 1,000,000 paper bags than plastic bags, so from that standpoint plastic bags aren’t worse.
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p>So why tax plastic bags?
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p>Litter. The reason Ireland did it — and the reason we should do it — is litter. Plastic bags blow in ways paper bags don’t. Plastic bags end up in the trees and bushes. They get in the rivers. They don’t degrade with water, so they occupy our rivers and streams and forests and grasslands and side-of-highways in ways paper bags just don’t. Ireland used to have real problems with the plastic bags all over the countryside. I know, I lived there 2000-2001. I’ve been back a number of times since, and there are just no plastic bags to be found.
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p>That written, the price per plastic bag in Ireland isn’t five cents. It’s 33 cents. Personally, I think that five cents will have a substantial impact and that it’s a great place to start. The Irish do exactly what you’d expect — they keep a few Tesco canvas bags in the boot of their car.
If you believe as I do that the bag fee is about litter and not landfill/oil, then you should also consider that the percent of all beverage containers that are roadside and deposit is far lower than the percent which don’t have the nickel deposit.
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p>Want to reduce the amount of roadside litter, as well as litter that ends up in rivers and streams and forests and grasslands and wetlands and everywhere else?
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p>Do any/all of the following:
* Expand the bottle bill to include non-carbonated beverages like water and iced tea
* Increase the deposit to 10 cents like Michigan
* Implement a $0.25 deposit on bottles of wine or booze
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p>Currently it costs towns about $80 to be rid of a ton of collected trash and $50-$60 per ton of bottles and cans. For every additional ton of bottles and cans returned for deposit, you’ve lowered the cost burden on the town. For every can or bottle pulled from a litter barrel, you’ve lowered the costs twice — collection can be less frequent and cost to dispose/recycle goes down. With more bottles having deposit, kids and poor people will collect the water and tea bottles that they leave roadside now.
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p>Expanding the bottle bill reduces landfill waste, reduces litter, reduces city and town costs, and helps avoid the mining or harvesting of new raw materials. The deposit bill is a phenomenal environmental success, and that success should be expanded.
Lots of charities go around collecting recyclables to collect and donate the redemptions. A company I used to work for, for example, had the cans collected by an outfit called “Cans for Cancer”, donating the money to the American Cancer Society. My wife, at her workplace, has been collecting cans to donate the money to FSMA. So a higher and expanded deposit fee would benefit not just “kids and poor people” but charities as well.
“The production of paper bags creates 70 percent more air pollution than plastic.” So I’m not sure we should tax plastic and not paper. They can be different rates, sure, but paper shouldn’t get off scott-free.
I think the strong argument for taxing plastic bags is litter — a problem to which paper bags don’t really contribute.
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p>If the motivation is pollution, oil consumption, or landfill space, plastic bags and paper bags are both tiny contributors. This isn’t to say that their contribution ought not be curtailed, but that if your goal is to reduce any of those things there are far easier ways to get reductions.
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p>If, however, your beef is with litter in natural places, be it in the branches of a street tree downtown or in a stream in your town, plastic bags [and bottles & cans] are the chief contributors and warrant special treatment.
That bill is a great first start to aligning special education with kids rather than bureaucrats. Smart thinking, Jen.