Help the deserving

Mayor de Blasio has promised to remove hurdles for families seeking taxpayer funds for special education tuition at private schools — warding off mandates threatened by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.

The mayor and Chancellor Carmen Fariña must now proceed with caution to avoid creating a hugely expensive stampede of students out of public school programs.

Under federal law, the Department of Education must pay for private school for a disabled child if parents can show DOE is not equipped to meet the student’s needs.

Such schooling isn’t cheap: It runs an average of $60,000 a year for private special ed, in contrast to $45,000 for services in public schools.

To discourage parents from simply opting out of public school, particularly for common learning disabilities, the Bloomberg team systematically challenged families seeking city funding.

Silver felt the Department of Education was too tough on families seeking better for their kids (an interesting stance by a man who has fought efforts to give the parents of general education students even the choice of charter schools).

De Blasio responded by committing to decide eligibility within 15 days and to refrain from yearto-year legal challenges. That should ease the way — perhaps so much that private education will become a primary option for many more students.

This isn’t to argue that any child should be trapped in lousy schooling. But it is to state that the mayor and chancellor must give tickets out of the system only to the most deserving children who really have no other choice.