My public school drives my absolutely bananas. I wanted to get Madison’s hearing screened just to make sure that there were no problems. We thought maybe some of Madison’s attention issues were due to her not hearing. However, my school being the pain in butt that they are wouldn’t do it unless we scheduled her to be prescreened for preschool through the school (which is a joke but I’ll tell you about that later). Obviously, there is some sort of federal funding they get for this, because I wanted a five minute screening and got stuck with an hour long screening. I sucked it up and took her.
I swear that they expect these kids to have a flash memory drive in their heads. I could hear some of the things they were testing her on, and from what I could tell, she was doing well. When they called me up after the testing was over, I was right. Except for cutting and catching, she scored everything else in the 6 year old range. Madison is only 4. I am seriously wondering if some of the attention issues we are having with her at preschool are due to her being bored. That was the good news.
The bad new was that we failed her hearing screening. I asked what the school would do for that. The answer: nothing. We would have to pay for additional testing elsewhere. The other thing that ticked me off to no end was that she couldn’t even get into the school preschool if I wanted to send her. The only kids who get in are those who are considered “at risk” (which Madison is obviously not) and if we made less than $80,000 a year. Umm, yeah. We make more than that. In Chicago, I am not sure if you can even own a decent house making less than $80,000 a year. Basically, the only kids who get in are those who don’t speak English (because there were several kids like that there) and low income people. I guess my question is what about the middle class? Why do we always get screwed?
4 Days Left 
It still knocks me back to see the differences in the cost of living in various parts of the country. $80,000 would be awesome for us here in Chattanooga.
Glad she passed the test (I read ahead). My husband failed a hearing test a few years back, but when he went in for the more in depth, his hearing was fine.
Being from Wisconsin, I was in sticker shock when I saw house prices down here. Tear down houses in Chicago are $200,000. My house would be half the price in Wisconsin. It almost makes me sick. I also pay a 10% sales tax rate. And gas is $2.40 a gallon (at least Sunday it was).
Your cost of living also shocked me. I am in Florida and poverty level or to qualify for any assistance is about $25,000 and under for a family of three! And the cost of houses, rents, food and gas raised very quickly making it not possible to live on that much and causing a lot of families here to go homeless or move out of the state to find better work opportunities. 90% of the jobs here are minimum wage (and the big department stores and the theme parks get away with paying interns and senior citizens below minimum wage).
But I was surprised by your question "what about the middle class?" Your question should be "Why do YOU pay taxes to pay for services given to others and not you?" A TAX paid by every citizen should benefit every citizen, not a select few.
However, the way our current system works and the way Obama wants it to keep working, is that the poor do not pay taxes, the rich find loopholes to pay less taxes (and sometimes none, but they do this by giving their money in other ways like charities most of the time), but the middle class ends up paying the most taxes, and what happens to the money; the poor gets to stay poor and get all their expenses paid with unearned money from charities paid for by the rich and taxes paid for by the middle class.
Now, I am not attacking poor people, everyone has bad luck every once in a while. But there are those that choose to be poor and homeless, and those that are just lazy, and those that are addicts, and those that are not educated, and those that are mentally challenged. Every one has a story.
But when you are middle class and have a bind, who is going to look out for you when you looked out for everyone else the whole time? Some can argue that now it is the time for others to pay for your bind the way you paid for other's and what comes around goes around. Or one can argue that you can work hard to get out of your own bind and learn from your mistakes which perhaps everyone else would have been doing if they had no handouts.
It is just my .02 but I personally believe that if people were left to fend on their own and just get guidance instead of money that there would be less people waiting for handouts and getting to action to help themselves. I know there was a big improvement in Massachusetts when they changed the welfare laws to limit it to two years and only if the mother was looking for a job or getting job training.
I am also in Florida and poverty level or to qualify for any assistance is about $25,000 and under for a family of three! And the cost of houses, rents, food and gas raised very quickly making it not possible to live on that much and causing a lot of families here to go homeless or move out of the state to find better work opportunities. 90% of the jobs here are minimum wage.