My hs class will have a reunion in 2019. Maybe some of the special ed students will attend. I’d guess back in 79 some of them weren’t that different than me. Maybe a slow learner or had problems reading. They’d be mainstreamed today.
I did accidentally learn about one guy in my Senior English class that could barely read. He was already working part time at a service station fixing flats, changing oil, and learning to be a mechanic. Our English teacher had several of us read some short passages out loud. I was absolutely shocked when he was stumbling over the words. It was my first time encountering illiteracy in someone my same age.
I went to Catholic schools, and there was only one class per grade in K-8. In high school (Catholic school also), there were AP classes and a little bit of variety in what you could take, but I don’t think there were any special ed classes.
My school district did keep those with a moderate to severe handicap in their own wing of the schools designed to equip their needs. Students with severe emotional disturbances (heavy behavioral problems) were kept in their own cohort. But, if the students had general learning disabilities, or physical handicap (not needing special medical attention), they were mainstreamed in the classroom. Depending on how many with an IEP were in the classroom, a special education teacher would co-teach with the content teacher.
Did we know who those students were? Absolutely. Didn’t change a thing though.
In primary school the teachers would give us things to do, then call various kids to the front and work with them one on one. I have such a fond memory of the headmaster who taught the oldest class. He’d slowly sharpen the kids pencil as a kind of cover story.
In my school district, you could tell all the special needs kids by who rode the “little bus.” I think that’s true of a lot of places, since that or “short bus” is used as a descriptor now. There was a boy with Down’s Syndrome who got picked up and dropped off every day and also a girl who lived on the same street as a bunch of friends. I think she sustained some sort of brain damage at birth. They had a building at one of the elementary schools from K-8, then they had a block of classrooms at each of the three high school. I think they could go there until they were 21.
I don’t remember any special ed kids at my elementary school, although we did have a teacher that would show up every once in a while and pull kids out of classes. I think it was taboo to ask the kids why.
In junior high and high school, all the academic classes were split up into basic, standard, college prep, and honors courses. The basic classes were pretty remedial and probably had all the kids that might be considered special ed now. My mom worked as a special ed aide at a high school for years and I don’t remember any classes like the ones she worked in being available when I was in school. Her kids were in some other regular classes, but just didn’t get how to do math. In my day, those kids would have been in the basic math taught by the football coach.
High school kids with behavioral issues or ones that were flunking out were sent to continuation school. That place was a whole school filled with Welcome Back Kotter-type kids.
Sure. I went to school in the 80s and 90s, and while there was a fair amount of mainstreaming even then, we caught on very young that only the kids we considered dumb ever spent time in the resource room.
Thank you for this. I have a son with moderate/severe autism starting his Sophmore year and I often wondered about it.
I know that his group that he goes to class with has their own art and PE teachers. They also pick up their lunch and take it back to their wing of classrooms.
60s and early 70s. Both in my rural district and suburban/small city district we had a couple “little slow kids” and one girl on crutches but that was about the limit. There was a kid in the neighborhood who was flat-out Down syndrome and a couple wheelchair kids. Where they went to school, I have no idea.
At my public school in the 80’s I remember one classroom that was for the “special” kids - learning disabilites I guess, because anyone with physical handicaps wouldn’t be able to attended due to the stairs everywhere. The classroom was different than the others, it had a little room in the middle of it and cushions on the floor if I remember correctly. When I was in Grade 7 or 8 they made a room in the basement for the special kids and about a half-dozen or so were in there. I remember one little boy who at the beginning of the year would walk up to us and hit us but by the end of the year he’d walk up to us and shake our hands. There was also a girl who was non-verbal but I remember her showing me her homework and how proud she was of it. I couldn’t understand her so I’d just smile and nod and say “Wow that’s great, good job.”
When I was a kid in the 80s, we knew that there was such a thing as special ed students, but knew basically nothing about them except that they rode the short bus (“riding the short bus” was, of course, a school-kid insult). I assume that they had classes in the same building as us, since the short bus did come to our school, but we never had any interaction with them. Within the classroom, students would be sorted by ability in each subject (there’d be a “green reading group”, a “yellow reading group”, and a “red reading group”, for instance), but the reds weren’t to the point of being “special”, it was all established by the individual teacher, categories could vary from subject to subject, and students could change groups as their ability changed.
Nowadays, in any competent school district, the special students will be mainstreamed as much as possible (just how much is possible varies from student to student; each is treated independently), but any class with special ed students in it will also have a teacher’s aide to work with them specifically, and they’ll also have some classes and other resources of their own as necessary.
In the incompetent school districts, meanwhile (and I won’t name any major metropolitan school district that might happen to be near me), they’re mostly mainstreamed completely into the normal classrooms, with a teacher with no particular special ed training or resources, who has to single-handedly look out for them and thirty other students. This works about as well as you’d expect.
Yep. Had one in our nieghborhood. The short bus showed up at the same time as the long bus so we all hung out at the bus stop together. Everyone was friendly with the kid. Could have been because his mom hung out at the bus stop too. But even outside of that we’d play ball and stuff with him around the nighborhood.
In middle and high school we’d see them out and about walking the halls and at lunch but they had their own classrooms.
I knew there was a class. They were kept away from the rest of us at all times but we occasionally saw them getting on the bus to go home. Even their bus was on the other side of the building.
We also had a large glass of vision impaired students and a blind teacher. They were in our main building with us but I can only remember seeing them at lunch. I think their lunch was later than the rest of the school so they were coming in as we were leaving.
I was in CLUE so I left my school twice a week to go to another school. Kids in CLUE were called clue-tards. Nice, eh?
I was a special ed teacher. PL 94-142 states that all schools that receive federal funds must provide appropriate classroom settings for all students in their district regardless of physical or mental handicap in the least restrictive setting. That means that some kids are in the regular classroom, some are in a self-contained special ed class, and some may require a hospital, home, or restricted space that the school district is required to provide education to (remember when pregnant girls stayed home and had a visiting teacher?) This law came into being in the US in 1975. You might not have been aware of special ed, but if you went to public school after 1975 in the US, your school was required to provide special ed services.
The informal setting of a class for “slow kids” is called tracking and is illegal. Sweathogs made an interesting premise for a show, but couldn’t exist. In order to receive special services, a student must be evaluated by a team usually comprised of a parent or guardian, a psychologist, a school administrator, the regular classroom teacher, and a representative from the special ed faculty. This group is required to meet every twelve months for each individual student to determine as a group the current and future placement of the student.
Special ed covers many different situations: mental retardation, dyslexia, ADHD, emotional disturbance, learning disabilities, autism, and kids with other health impairments which require them to miss a lot of school (I had one kid with sickle cell anemia and another who spent a lot of time in dialysis.