Rounds Vetoes Deaf Education Bill on Grammar...

...and on points of federal law.

KELO reports "outrage" at Governor Rounds's veto of HB 1242, a bill that would have amended South Dakota's existing "bill of rights" for deaf children and purportedly expand services for such students. The wording of the amendment doesn't seem to do much: where SDCL 13-33B-1 currently lays responsiblity for such programs at the feet of the Department of Education, HB 1242 makes the Board of Regents responsible as well. In its only other explicit policy change, HB 1242 appears to authorize individual education program teams to require certain actions for deaf students.

HB 1242 was intended to remedy problems like those testified to by 17-year-old Taner Kiewel, who in February told the House education committee that South Dakota's education system had failed him by not providing interpreters who know American Sign Language [Bill Harlan, "Douglas Middle School to House Education," Mount Blogmore, 2008.02.05].

So how did HB 1242 make Governor Rounds's "Big Seven" veto list released Friday? Rounds says HB 1242 would violate federal law (which gets involved because of strings attached to the federal money we accept for K-12 education). According to the governor, the bill doesn't provide funding, it involves the Board of Regents in an issue that is the strict purview of the Department of Education, and it improperly delegates authority to IEP teams.

Interestingly, the Governor also includes a grammar critique in his veto statement. The bill makes a point of revising every instance of the phrase "deaf and hard-of-hearing children" to "children who are deaf and hard-of-hearing."* That change appears to come out of nowhere. If it's some new p.c. wording (like saying "people living with AIDS" rather than "AIDS sufferers"), it's pretty subtle, and not even the National Association of the Deaf has picked up on it.

But the change is harmless, right? Wrong! Governor Rounds whips out his English teacher hat and makes the following observation:

The bill also repeatedly uses the phrase “children who are deaf and hard-of-hearing” which is inconsistent with the avowed intent of the proponents. This language limits the benefits of the Act to children who are both deaf and hard of hearing, even though these phrases designate separate categories of disability. A more accurate expression of the proponents’ intent would require the substitution of the phrase “children who are deaf or hard-of-hearing” throughout the bill [Governor M. Michael Rounds, veto message to Thomas J. Deadrick, Speaker of the House, South Dakota State Legislature, 2008.03.13].

I have to admit, the Governor has a point. If you're going to amend a bill, you've got to do it right. A single word, an and instead of an or, can render an entire bill useless... or at least veto-worthy, in the eyes of the Governor.

But tomorrow is Veto Day, the last day of the 2008 Legislative Session. Our legislators will have the chance to decide whether the Governor's concerns on HB 1242 really warrant the veto. HB 1242 passed 28-7 in the Senate, but its 43-25 vote in the House won't be enough to overturn the Governor's veto. There may be parental outrage, but if the Governor is right, well, grammar is grammar, and federal law is federal law.

*The Governor might also have pointed out that moving the noun from the end of the phrase to the beginning changes "hard-of-hearing" from a noun-pre-positional adjective to a predicate adjective, requiring the hyphens to disappear: "children who are hard of hearing."