Texas Schools for Handicapped Learn to Fight Their Own Private Battles

Trevor, a tough-looking 19-year-old with blond hair down to his shoulders, stood outside a dorm at the rustic Devereux School in Victoria, Tex., and said: “I feel like I owe Fairfax County something.”

If the Fairfax County, Va., juvenile courts had not sent him to Devereux nine months earlier, he said that he would “either be dead in the ditch or in a hospital still withdrawing from drugs, in a mental home or just crazy on the streets being a bum.”

The price for Trevor and each of his classmates: from $45,600 to a shade under $100,000 a year.

The tab for students at the Oaks, another boarding school outside Austin, Tex., is even higher: $350 a day, plus $29 for “educational therapy,” or $140,525 a year.

Not Fancy Retreats

These are not fancy academic retreats for the fabulously wealthy. They are part of the most specialized, and expensive, side of special education: schools that double as fully accredited psychiatric hospitals, blending education, therapy and custodial care for seriously disturbed youths who have exhausted the patience and resources of public schools.

“This is the end of the line, so to speak,” said Lucy Ford, an administrator at the Oaks, part of a profit-making psychiatric chain called the Brown Schools. “They look like normal kids, but inside they are a mess.”

There are 4.3 million American schoolchildren classified as handicapped; only 16,972, or 0.39%, had problems severe enough to require treatment in private residential facilities in 1984-85, according to statistics gathered by the U.S. Department of Education. The majority were emotionally disturbed.

Another 41,312 others lived in public institutions, including homes for the mentally retarded, deaf and blind, as well as the disturbed.

Who can afford $140,525 a year?

Help in Picking Up Tab

For most, medical insurance pays the bills. State agencies or public school districts pick up the tab for some. A few--very few--have rich parents who simply write a check each month.

The Civilian Health and Medical Program of the Uniformed Services (CHAMPUS), a military benefits plan, has tried to limit how much it pays for 450 disturbed children of servicemen and women.

“We see a spread of costs anywhere from $40 a day to almost $400, and it’s hard for us to say why,” said Col. Jimmy Helton, director of CHAMPUS.

Some states that once routinely shipped disturbed youngsters to the Devereux or Brown schools or similar facilities now keep them at home. Cities such as Boston and Houston have opened or expanded alternative public schools for disturbed teen-agers they once expelled or left to juvenile courts.

Five years ago, another Brown School in Texas, the San Marcos Treatment Center, had 48 patients paid for entirely by Texas school districts. This year it had eight.

Cost a Factor in Growth

The steep cost of private treatment is one factor driving the expansion of public programs, but so is the mainstreaming philosophy that undergirds the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, which guarantees schooling in the “least restrictive environment.”

“Quite frankly, my goal for bringing all those kids back has nothing to do with cost. It has to do with likelihood of success,” said Judy Schrag, Washington state’s assistant education superintendent for special services. Her state now sends only three violence-prone teens out of state, down from 25 in 1980.

“Common sense tells me that the farther away from the home and the family and the parents, the less likely you’ll be able ever to maintain that child in the community and the home,” Schrag said.

The private residential treatment centers are scrambling to keep their dorms filled and intensifying their marketing efforts, with 800 toll-free telephone lines to admission offices, glossy brochures and picture book campuses. They also must compete with psychiatric hospitals that have expanded programs aimed at runaways, drug abusers and other problem adolescents.

Ford said that early intervention by public schools has cut the number of young children referred to the Oaks, which once had a wing just for children as young as 5. Now none of its patients is under 10; the average age is 15.

‘The Way It Should Be’

“That’s good. That’s the way it should be. You don’t want to take a child out of the home unless you have to,” Ford said. “We’re only getting the kids that they can’t manage, the toughest kids, and that’s what we should be dealing with.”

“It’s a crucial period for Devereux in Texas because we’re going to have to find our niche,” said John Strahm, who became director of the Victoria facility two years ago after the parent Devereux Foundation nearly closed it when enrollment slid to 106, half the level of a decade ago. The foundation, a nonprofit group based in Devon, Pa., operates centers in six other states.

Devereux in Victoria now draws more than half its students from Texas, compared to fewer than one in five previously. The average length of stay has dropped from nearly two years to less than one.

“There’s all kinds of images of what we do here: a school for rich kids, a school for retarded kids, a private reform school,” Strahm said. “Nobody has any conception that we’re a licensed hospital.”

The buildings at the treatment center are scattered around a wooded 400-acre campus where 120 students can study academics, do odd jobs around campus for pay or spend time in vocational programs.

Print Shop, Ceramics

A print shop, a ceramics class and a horticulture program form the heart of its “career development center.” Six new Apple IIC computers are plugged into what used to be the wood shop.

The staff of 210 includes two full-time psychiatrists. There are classrooms and a gym; a locked facility for the most troubled youngsters; dorms with fewer restrictions and a sheltered workshop for those with low IQs.

In the locked Evaluation and Stabilization Unit, the furniture in the cinder-block bedrooms is built in “so there’s not much for them to throw around if they blow,” Devereux principal Suzy Baugh said.

There are also five peach-painted seclusion rooms with bare mattresses where students are sent, or go on their own, to let off steam.

A coed dorm at the Intermediate Treatment Unit, by contrast, is cozier and filled with rock posters, stuffed animals and other adolescent bric-a-brac.

Chris, 17, has a piano in his room. After 21 months at Devereux, the aspiring musician said: “It’s not as bad as everybody says it is.

“After you’ve been here a while, you can look back, and before--it might have been drugs, it might have been family problems--you couldn’t really get a clear idea of what you wanted to do in life,” he said.

“This place, for me, anyway, I can see what I want to do and how I’m going to go about it. I couldn’t do that before.”

Fringe Benefits, Too

Students’ behavior is monitored closely and graded daily. One perk for the best behaved is unlimited cigarette privileges.

Academic instruction is individualized. In English teacher Veda Voss’ class, one girl read Chaucer’s Canterbury tales (“It’s boring”), while a boy studied for a high school equivalency diploma exam.

Voss, a perennial student favorite who has taught at Devereux for more than two decades, said: “What works in my class is TLC (tender loving care). Once they know that I’m not an adversary--and many in the public schools are--I can get work out of them.”

Added Voss: “A sense of humor--that’s the best therapy there is.”

All therapy at Devereux is included in the treatment price. There is no homework; students spend their afternoon and evenings in programmed activities.

At the Oaks, all the therapy is added to the patients’ bills, from $60-per-hour speech sessions to $225 therapy sessions each month for the students’ families.

24-Hour Care

The private centers claim to offer what public schools and parents cannot: 24-hour care and surveillance of youngsters whose emotional problems can flare up at any moment.

They remove youths from unhappy and often abusive home lives and from the influence of companions.

Richard Wolleat, an assistant administrator at the San Marcos Treatment Center, said: “Mom and Dad end up having to be around every waking minute to make sure that little Johnnie is not out stealing a car someplace or getting stoned, running away from home and being gone for two weeks, terrorizing his little brother or sister.”

James Eberwine, director of the Oaks, said: “The secret is we’ve got the kids in processing from the time they get up in the morning until the time they go to bed at night. They can’t escape staff.”

“When you get every adult in a child’s life talking the same language and knowing what’s happening, you can really make a tremendous impact on even a child who’s had tremendous, chronic failure and difficulty,” said Ford of the Oaks.