Parents of Disabled Facing Tough Choices on School Cutbacks

The shortage of public school funding has come home with a vengeance for parents of children with learning disabilities, who learned Tuesday that they will have to make painful choices on what programs to cut for special education students.

Many parents protested to the San Diego school board concerning cuts in summer programs and early childhood services, saying that structured year-round instruction and preschool help are critical to giving learning-handicapped students a chance for productive lives.

Despite the pleas, school officials and board members said they had little choice but to go ahead with gradual reductions in services.

Board member Jim Roache said that, emotionally, he wanted to restore services for the disabled but that to do so would mean cuts instead for bilingual education or textbook purchases or a host of other programs already pared to the bone.

‘Real Dilemma’

“It’s a real dilemma,” Roache said of the belt-tightening for disabled students, who include the deaf, the blind, the hard of hearing, the mentally retarded and the physically impaired.

At issue were several cuts announced recently by the special education department. On Monday, the special five-day-a-week programs in infant and preschool education for disabled were slashed to two days a week for children entering the system beginning this semester. Supt. Tom Payzant said the needed money--about $500,000--is not available for the additional teachers or classrooms needed because of increased demand for such services.

In addition, the special education department has proposed cutting back from nine weeks to six weeks the length of summer school for special education students. That would save $125,000 in transportation costs but also satisfy special education teachers who say they need a longer summer vacation to recover from the strain of handling often-difficult students.

“A cut of three weeks will mean that my son will forget a lot of things he learns during the year,” said Mary Moore, noting that disabled children, to a much greater extent than regular students, forget instruction received during the year.

And she said that the knowledge received, such as learning how to cross the street alone, is crucial to the students’ futures.

“My son can’t go outside the house to the next-door neighbor without someone else . . . he can’t go to the park and play with other kids because he doesn’t have friends in the neighborhood like other kids, he will regress so much during the summer, his whole day will totally fall apart,” pleaded Elisheza Green.

Payzant said that the district cannot offer a “quality” nine-week program any longer and said that the best the district could do, if directed by the board, would be to “offer good baby-sitting.”

But Payzant offered to discuss the summer school plan again with parents and the program’s citizens advisory committee in an effort to come up with alternatives to the board in two weeks, although he held out little hope of a change.

He also will study the cuts in infant and preschool care one more time, but again offered no optimism. Payzant apologized for not considering the harsh reaction the cuts would have among parents, because all children currently enrolled in the programs will continue to receive five-day-a-week instruction.

However, several parents with children about to enroll in the programs bitterly denounced the district, and said the eventual result will be kindergarten children less able to function normally in regular programs and ultimately more of a cost to the district.

“My children are not going to go away,” Marety Jones said of his son with cerebral palsy. “You can pay now, or you can pay later.”