Twelve days from now, we should know who counts and who doesn't in this province. With Queen's Park coffers reportedly in good shape, there's no excuse for the March 23 budget not to ease constrictions on programs that help people unfairly relegated to the margins of society. That includes people struggling to survive on disability support payments and children with disabilities, who deserve far more than they are getting from the current dysfunctional special education system. Two years ago, people forced to rely on the Ontario Disability Support Program received a 3 per cent raise, bringing the maximum payment to $957.90 a month. (Most get little more than half that.) Out of this they must pay for rent, utilities, food and personal care. If they find a job, they can keep only $160 a month in earnings free and clear. Above that, the province taxes them at a rate of 75 per cent. Advocates want ODSP rates raised by 10 per cent, bringing the maximum to $1,053.69 a month or $12,644.28 a year. They also want the steep tax clawback on earnings lowered. Seems like a no-brainer to me. Never mind dignity and humanity and all that stuff. Abject poverty is bad for the health. And what's bad for the health is bad for the bottom line, which is bad for taxpayers, who will pay dearly over the long term for short-changing Ontarians with disabilities. Same is true in spades for kids with special needs. Like any other children, their future is full of promise, given the education they're entitled to. Instead, the $1.8 billion special education system in Ontario is mired in negativity precipitated to a large degree by the previous government's funding formula that focused on medical diagnoses rather than educational needs. Even when children were given a prescription for a specific education plan, a Star series last year found no way to follow the money, no accountability throughout the system and too many complete communication breakdowns between families and schools. To his credit, Education Minister Gerard Kennedy acknowledged the problems. Last spring he set up a working table on special education, co-chaired by Brock University's Sheila Bennett and MPP Kathleen Wynne, Kennedy's parliamentary assistant. The working committee's initial mandate was to look at funding. But Wynne and Bennett broadened that to include everything from teacher training and parent satisfaction to accountability. As Wynne put it in an interview last summer: "The mandate has to be broader than funding because we can't get the funding right unless we know the outcomes we want." The working table had its last meeting in December. Its report has gone to Kennedy but it still has not been released. "The best I can say is soon," a spokesperson for the minister says. "We're busy looking at the (fiscal) year-end figures and working on special education grants for next year, trying to tie in some of the (working table's) recommendations." The good news is that the March 23 date set for the provincial budget (well ahead of the traditional May date) will give schools more time to plan effective programs for the year ahead. Ideally, the work being done behind the scenes now will lead to constructive change. "The entire education funding formula is still based on benchmarks set back in 1998," notes Marilyn Dolmage, founder of the Ontario Coalition for Inclusive Education and one of the so-called consumer representatives on the working table. At that time, the ministry based many funding decisions on the infamous intensive support allowance (ISA), a framework most parents loathe. Under ISA, the worse the label attached to a child, the more support the school board could apply for. "However, the ministry never required this money to be spent on the students whose documentation met the criteria," Dolmage notes. So even if a student were allotted ISA funding for, say, a full-time educational assistant, there was no guarantee the assistant would be available. Throughout his tenure as minister, Kennedy has shown himself to be painfully aware of the crisis in special education. He has spoken in interviews with the Star about "bringing some dignity" to the field and "destigmatizing" the process of frustrating, lengthy and too often futile series of assessments, reviews, interviews, hearings, correspondence and phone calls parents have become accustomed to. He has pledged to banish ISA. He is also, by all accounts, in the process of being drafted to run for the leadership of the federal Liberals. If he were to accept, his voice would be sorely missed at Queen's Park. Dolmage says all members of the working table did not see the final version of the group's recommendations before they went to the minister. And students with disabilities are by no means the only ones hoping for more support in the provincial budget. We can only hope Queen's Park will do the right thing.