Developmentally Disabled Kids in Public Schools

Great Debates
1

My father is a disability activist. I have always been taught to respect people with disabilites and treat them as humans, not with pity. However, I think that the way public schools handle developmentally disabled kids is the biggest crock in the world.

Why stick these kids in regular school with an aide, where they will learn nothing more than that they are “different?” They are not learning skills that will help them gain independance. I’m not talking elementary school, when I do think socialization is important. I’m talking high school. From my experiance in high school with the DD kids, they sit in a special ed classroom all day, participating in gym and music classes. How is this an education for them? How about vocational training, classes on how to live in a group home, and more “real life” situations, so that they can have a life of their own?

A friend of my family just died and she has a son with DD who is 36. He dealt with her death in his own way, bringing flowers to her grave. Now he’s blossomed, he’s taking care of himself, and gleefully announced to us that he shaved himself for the first time in his life. I don’t think he’s very rare, I think DD people are taught they can’t do anything, until they beleive it.

I do think there is a danger in isolating DD people, so that they see themselves even more in the context of being disabled and less of being a human. Any thoughts?

DON PEDRO: Your silence most offends me, and to be merry best becomes you; for, out of question, you were born in a merry hour.

BEATRICE: No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born. -Much Ado About Nothing, Act II, Sc: i

2

It makes me sad when I see these people, not sad really, but I wish people would be nicer and not joke about them, I think they are closer to GOD then we ever will be

3

Why are they closer to god?

4

Mrs. Kunilou has been a special education teacher for 25 years, and she can tell you about the warehousing that used to take place (and often still does) with any students who are likely to bring the curve down.

The truth is, you can either put them in regular classes, have them learn what they can (sometimes with the help of an aide), and pull them out for special classes when needed

-OR-

You can pack them off to a special room or a special school and not be bothered with them anymore.

Most of my wife’s former students went on to whatever kind of vocational training was available to them – they didn’t try to mainstream their way into college prep classes. However, the vocational departments, too, are tired of being labeled as a dumping ground for students who aren’t smart. They’ve tightened their requirements.

I’ve always believed that the U.S. education system is designed for the great middle – if you’re too far out of the mainstream in any direction, you won’t fit. Despite this, I still believe it’s preferable to European or Asian systems that start slotting you into different paths from almost the first day you start school.

I understand all the words, they just don’t make sense together like that.

5

Why do you think its better? I sure wish I had been taken out of the class full of dullards that I coexisted with for the first 9 years of my schooling. I had no serious education alternatives till I got to highschool and could take accelerated classes. I figure they wasted around five years of my life.

6

I work with DD adults. I am certain many of the people I work with did not have the IQ to go to a “regular” school. However, a few probably have (not that I asked.) Right now the people I work with know that they are “different”, but they are not unhappy, all-in-all. They go out in the community, they have fun social activities. Hell, the dances that are arranged for these people are really fun. DD adults can “get down” with far more abandon and healthy fun than many “normal” people I know!

My feeling is - whatever makes the most sense, as far as education goes. I think that school - especially High School, can be very cruel and ruthless. Hell, I was made miserable during school, because I didn’t dress nice enough, and was fat! I see no benefit to a DD child being thrust in an environment where there is a chance (good chance, in some cases) where they will be made to feel more alienated. IF that is what would happen - I couldn’t speak for all schools. If there is some concrete evidence that a DD child would benefit from being placed in a regular school, then that is one thing. But if it is done out of some misguided “Political Correctness”, well, bullshit. Trust me - I have heard about and seen Political Correctness run amok in regards to caring for DD people. Some “pencil pushers” in an office 100 miles away get some cockamamie idea in their heads about what is “best” for a DD person, even if it doesn’t make a lick of sense to those of us who actually deal with the DD individual on a daily basis. This happens all the time where I work.

7

The buzzword for this right now is “inclusion” (it used to be called “mainstreaming”, but now mainstreaming is used to mean that the DD individual is in a special ed classroom for the majority of the day, but attends regular art/music/recess). For me, the concern is not only what is best for the DD child, but what is fair to the other 29 students in the class. Proponents of full inclusion have this idealistic notion that every child’s needs will be perfectly assesed in advance, and that child provoded with all the additional aid and instruction they need, up to and includig a full time assistaint in the classroom. The reality is that this rarely, if ever, happens. Kids are dumped into mainstream classrooms with a bevy of special physical/intellectual needs and the teacher in given little or no guidance, let alone help, in adjusting to their needs.

Special needs children can be emensely time consuming. On the most basic level, the physical demands of a disabled child can be trying; children with poor bowel or bladder control, for example, are a nightmare if you are trying to keep eighth graders on task. Children with very poor social skills also lead to time away from teaching-- kids who cannot sit still, cannot stop hitting people, etc. If a child’s disability is severe enough that they cannot do the material normally presented in class, the teacher can either a)try to prepare an alternate cirriculum and tutor the special needs child in it while teaching the rest of the class or b) give up on the special needs child and simply pass them regardless of preformance, improvement, or anything at all. If the teacher does “b” he is doing the child a grave disservice; if they teacher opts for “a” he inevitably neglects the rest of the class. There are not enough hours in the day to both teach and tutor adequatly.

My cousin teaches school in upstate NY. Two years ago she had a student in her class (6th grade) with Turret’s Syndrome. He was evidently a very nice little boy and a good student when he took his medication. But he was also 11, so he frequently forgot his pills. On those days she said that she might as well not of had class–there is no way to teach to children, especially children of that age, with someone shouting obsenities in the back. This is not fair to the other kids. I don’t know what the answer is here, but it is not throwing kids into unprepared classrooms the way they do today under the heading of “inclusion,” and I don’t know where anyone thinks we could find the money to do it right.

8

By law, handicapped students must be put into “the least restrictive environment” appropriate to their educational needs. It goes without saying that this can spark great debate between the parents and the school administration, often resulting in lawsuits.

I can’t speak for Mrs. Kunilou, but personally I’m not a big supporter of the law, for reasons several of you have noted. But it’s not an issue of current “politcal correctness” – if I recall, it was enacted in the 1970s. I’m waiting for some student to get hurt by an out-of-control student, sue the school district and the U.S. Dept. of Education, and have it go downhill from there.

As to why I prefer the American system of education the answer is simple – I bloomed later than many other people. Sorry if you feel like your elementary school years were wasted by dullards, but that gave me the opportunity I needed to get grounded in the fundamentals so that I could go on and take those advanced classes in high school. In Europe I would have been routed to “file clerk” or something similar when I was 11.

I understand all the words, they just don’t make sense together like that.

9

I realize some people know this but I am saying it again for those who don’t: I have a developmentally disabled son. He is in class with the non-DD kids. I’m grateful they did it. When we were younger, kids like him were in different parts of the school where people didn’t know about them. Then people learned about them in junior or senior high, where kids are the cruelest.

Now they are put in with other kids and they learn from day one that everybody is different and some people need help (at least here where I live). There was a blind girl in the class and they helped her around. There are kids in wheelchairs and they help them out (WILLINGLY…they offer to do it and aren’t asked to). They were told Greg had trouble speaking and tried to help him when he couldn’t say what he wanted and cheered him on when he did it.

They accept the kids and try to help them. Greg does have to leave the room to go to speech and occupational therapy but the kids are great about it. He is never made to feel like an outsider. Greg can speak now (not as clearly as you or I can but there was a time when they didn’t think he’d ever speak). Being with other kids helped. It encouraged him.

And he’s not hurting the learning curve. He is in the advanced spelling and math classes and does better than the majority of his classmates.

People need to learn early that some people need help. The kids in his room will think that it is the norm that some people need help. I know that the OP was talking about highschool but see where I’m going? If kids learn early that some people are different then that should cut down on the concerns people have. I am not naive enough to think it would stop the problems but I am glad he’s with other kids instead of put away from them. And I also know that each case scenario is different. But I feel as though I have to speak out when people start saying how bad it is to mainstream. It’s not always a bad thing to do.

MaryAnn
“I don’t care if it’s the queen!”

10

Mainstreaming, sheltering, inclusion, tracking, achievement orientation, and another dozen buzzwords have passed through the lexicon in the decades since the sixties, when the horror of the realities of our institutional “services for crippled children” were publicly displayed. The realities are better, now, in the institutions. But now we have “community based supports” which have the overwhelming advantage loved by every politician. They are cheaper.

The population of handicapped people is so very much broader than any uninvolved person realizes. The phrase 100% disabled is used endlessly, and is even required for certain levels of services. The entire concept is bogus. ** One hundred** percent disabled is dead. If you can hear someone say it, even if you can’t understand it, you are not one hundred percent disabled. Breathing and swallowing without assistance is extraordinarily important, and one would expect that having those skills would imply less than total disability.

There are people out there who cannot, and never will provide support for their own lives. They are not less human for that condition. Some are sweet, and loveable children, with angelic smiles, and a trusting love for all mankind. Some are selfish, bitter old men, who enjoy causing disruption, and destruction of the very systems on which their lives depend. The point is that they are not deserving of more, or less because of their likeability. What reason to have a society, to support a government, if not to ensure that the least able are provided with a decent life?

The answers are extraordinarily complex, because the problem is as complex as any that we face. The survival of critically ill infants is higher than it has ever been in history. That means that the population of the disabled is growing faster than the rest of the population. The reason is that we choose not to abandon them in the wild, but to save them. Save them for what? Having made the obvious, and easy choice to succor them as infants, we balk at the huge cost of maintaining their lives over the decades that they will now live.

I have one thing to say on mainstreaming. It serves one vital function for society, and one for the individuals themselves. It opens up the door, and makes us live in a world where some of us drool, vomit, and pee on ourselves, and some of us are vicious bullies of any we perceive as weaker, or different. Both of those things are painful. Revealing and healing both are needful, if we want our society to grow. Learn to get over your aversion, and learn to live with your handicaps, out in public. Learn to pay for it, too.

Tris

Imagine my signature begins five spaces to the right of center.

11

It sounds like you have your son in a school that understands his needs and fosters a fantastic tolerant classroom. I wish every DD kid had that.

What I guess I’m aiming at, however, is that I watched kids in my high school with Down’s shuttled from one classroom to another, where they were learning only to be more dependant on thier aides. After witnessing the blossoming of our 36 year old DD friend, I saw what an amazing transformation happens when capable people are able to be independant. And I don’t think our school system is fostering that. Instead of teaching them skills they can use (what is required if they are able to keep a job, what living in a group home means, how to eat right,) rather than mainstreaming them into a curriculm that tends to be pretty useless for non-DD people. (Normans invaded England in 1033. How useful is that?)

But as MaryAnneQ illustrated, not all schools fail at inclusion, and some are actually…including. So maybe it’s just the Vermont state school system that fails these people.

12

Any school system which fails to have some sort of vocational education is doing a disservice, not just to the DD, but to students who, for one reason or another, don’t want to or can’t go on to college.

However, any vocational program has an academic component. Even if students aren’t going to retain much of it (hell, I didn’t retain much high school math!) they should be exposed to it. That’s part of what “education” is.

I can make the argument that music, art, even P.E., didn’t equip me with any skills I needed in the real world. I believe my school realized that few of us would go on to be musicians, artists, or pro athletes. But that didn’t stop them from requiring that all of us took those courses.

I understand all the words, they just don’t make sense together like that.

13

Tris said:

This is a very nice sentiment, but it dosen’t fix anything. Any properly implemented inclusion program that extends to all or close to all students is going to be extrordinarily expensive. School budgets are finite. What are you wiling to cut? New books? Up class size to 45? Art and music programs? The library? Most schools already function on a shoestring. It is not at all rare for schools to use vending machine profits to pay the electric bill.

Now, I do think that many children who were/are traditionally isolated could benefit from being included inthe regular clasroom. However, I do not think that such inclusion should come at the cost of the education of the other children. One child cannot and should not take up 50% of the class’s resources, something that is often the case when you combine severely disabled children with untrained, unaided teachers. Serious inclusion fans want to put every chiuld in a regular classroom tomorrow, regardless of physical or mental disability. People may need to learn that " some of us drool, vomit, and pee on ourselves," but not at the cost of not leaning their multiplication tables.

One thing that I think would help the problem would be a more flexable assignment system. As it stands today children are assesed once, early in their education, and future planning is largely dependent on that one early assesment. On one hand, this can mean a child who is being kept in the special ed classroom even though he ought to be in the regular classroom (In at least one school I observed at the special ed department’s funding depended on the number of warm bodies they had, and they were very reluctant to let a kid go. The bueracracy involved was so complex that they were more or less able to make any reassignment impossible). On the other hand, you also have students put in the regular classroom who do not really have the skills to be there, and it is just as impossible to move them out. Violent children are a real problem in this area. If a fifth grader is constantly biting and punching his classmates, no learning goes on, and every child in that class gets a year of negative opinions about both school and the disabled. It is a complex problem, and not one that lends itself to the idealistic solutions the “total inclusion” people often support.

14

This is a dificult question for me. You see, I have a disabled child. My daughter is 12 1/2 and has cerebral palsy. In her earliest school years she spent part of each day in resource classes – she has some visual-perceptual learning disablities that made it difficult to learn to read and to get a good start in math. She started kindergarden in a wheelchair, and that meant that she DID cause her teachers a little more trouble than the average kid. Especially because we never wanted her to have a full-time aide, so the teacher had to do a bit extra in terms of pushing her from place to place, helping her get in and out of the chair when need be, etc. In the early days, a resource teacher had to come into her class and help her to the bathroom when she needed to go. Although we always made every effort to make as few waves and demands as possible, I do recognise that Dori’s needs put some out-of-normal demands on her elementary school teachers. Back before the mainstreaming/ inclusion laws were passed, Dori would have been placed in a special ed school or classroom. Would that have been better? Wait for the rest of the story.

A few years ago Dori really started to blossom. The early LD classes sort of ‘clicked’ for her and she started doing well in her regular grade classroom. By halfway throuh 4th grade she was fully included – no resource time at all. Last week her report card showed 3 'A’s and 3 'B’s – in completely mainstream 6th grade classes. Also in 4th grade, she started using crutches more and her wheelchair less. By 5th grade she was only using the chair for transport to and from school – in class, on the playground and at lunch she used her crutches and she was completely responsible for her own personal needs – no more bathroom aide. Starting this year (6th grade, first year of middle school) she has used only her crutches at all times. The only ‘special-ed’ she recieves is 3-times-a-week adaptive PE because she can’t manage regular PE.

Of course, if she had been in special ed classes these improvements may still have happened. And we could have moved her into a ‘normal’ classroom as improvements warrented. Of course, that would have meant plopping her into a mainstream environment at the middle school level. This is what happened to those kids we all knew in the late 70s – they were yanked from special ed classes and plunked down in junior high and high schools around kids who had never seen a disabled person. I really do believe that her high school years will be easier for her because the other kids will have been exposed to different types of kids with different abilities and disabilities from kindergarden on.

That said, I am on the fence about “emotionally disabled” kids in a normal class room setting. No kid should be allowed to disrupt the learning process for an entire classroom. I would like to see a balance between the needs of individual kids and the needs of the classroom as a whole. I would also like to see more vocational educational opportunities for children of all abilities. I’m not saying there isn’t room for improvement. But I would hate like hell to see a return to the days of warehousing the disabled. More than hating it – I would fight it tooth and claw.

Oh, and the Normans conquered England in 1066.

Jess

Remember the Straight Dope credo: It’s all about wiping out ignorance, not coddling the ignorant.

15

I belonged to a message board for parents of DD children and you would not believe what a lot of those families are going through just to give their kids an education!

Schools that would ignore doctors orders (No, I’m not kidding), schools that just wanted the money for a special ed class but use the money for other things and not have an actual class, parents that had to take schools to court…and I’m not talking about them wanting to get the kids mainstreamed…they just wanted them to have an education PERIOD and the school systems wouldn’t do it.

I would post about the school system I belong to and I’d get hundreds of emails from people begging me to tell them where I live so they could move here (some from way out on the coasts. Yes, they’d move thousands of miles just to get help). I guess I got spoiled over here. The WI school system is excellent and bend over backwards for all kids, not just DD. I just couldn’t believe some of the stories I heard from parents about the way the school system was run. :frowning:

MaryAnn
“I don’t care if it’s the queen!”