Disabled Treated as Regular Students : School: A CSUN project puts handicapped children into a typical classroom while providing for their needs. Katy, 4, spoke for the first time.

By the time Brett and Jody Dicker’s autistic daughter was 4, her disruptive behavior often prevented them from going out in public. No matter what the Dickers said to her, little Katy with the blond ponytail and blue eyes screamed and cried but never said a word.

All that changed one week after she was placed in an innovative integration preschool program at Cal State Northridge’s Associated Students Children’s Center.

“One week after she started attending the school, Katy came home, looked me in the eyes and called me ‘Mommy,’ ” Jody Dicker said. “That was the first time she had ever called me that.”

Katy is one of 12 children with a variety of special needs who are involved in the program at CSUN’s children’s center. At least four are autistic, several have severe learning disabilities, and a few have comparatively mild disabilities such as chronic asthma or diabetes. There are 125 children ages 2 to 5 at the center, which serves children of CSUN students and the community when there is room.

“We wanted to model the project after society, and about 10% of the population has some kind of disability,” said Dr. Claire Cavallaro, director of the university’s CHIME Project (Children’s Center Handicapped Integration Model Educational Project).

The CHIME Project is the only Los Angeles-area program that integrates disabled children into a typical classroom while also providing for the special needs of those children. Although there are a few other preschool programs that have tried to include disabled children, they have not been able to provide speech therapy, physical therapy and one-to-one care for the children with special needs, Cavallaro said.

The Dickers, neither of whom is a CSUN student, plan to enroll Katy full time in the CHIME Project expansion this fall at the Preschool Lab, a campus preschool that serves the community.

“For Katy, it would be just devastating to put her back into special education classes after this kind of experience,” her mother said. “Because of the CHIME Project, Katy has defied everything the experts told us about what she would and wouldn’t be able to do.”

At age 2, Katy was diagnosed as autistic by specialists at UCLA, and she was immediately placed in a San Fernando Valley special education class for children with autism. The Dickers were told that their daughter would never socialize with other children and that she would probably never be able to use any meaningful language.

Unlike the savant character Dustin Hoffman played in the movie “Rainman,” most autistic children are severely withdrawn and unable to communicate. The other children in Katy’s special education class, also autistic, rarely spoke to, played with or even looked at each other, her mother said.

“Even though the people at that school were wonderful, the teacher pulled me aside and said that Katy’s destructive behavior was getting worse because Katy was frustrated and bored with the special education class,” Dicker said.

At that time, Elizabeth Fuller, a state case worker who had overseen Katy’s progress at the special education school, suggested she be placed in CSUN’s CHIME Project.

“Most importantly, I knew Katy would be able to learn from modeling after her peers who weren’t autistic,” Fuller said. “The program has made a tremendous difference in Katy’s life.”

Before Katy’s participation in the CHIME Project, she was completely withdrawn, anti-social and unable to communicate any of her needs. She had never called anyone in her family by name.

Today, Katy can join her able-bodied peers in nearly every activity common to 4-year-olds. She plays with dolls, runs, skips, dances and, most important, laughs and talks with other children.

The other children are sometimes the best teachers in this program, Dicker said, adding that the program is successful because Katy has specialists on hand to help her deal with problems as they arise.

“Any other time someone has tried this kind of program, the children with special needs have to have those needs met outside the classroom,” Cavallaro said. “This way, the child is at one place all day. We hope that one day there will be dozens of programs like this one.”

Special education experts agree that the CHIME Project is an ideal setting for handicapped children to learn from their able-bodied peers. In addition, it helps the able-bodied children become sensitive to and more accepting of children with disabilities.

“The reason the program at CSUN is so successful is because they have special education instructors at the site ready to meet the needs of disabled children,” said Victor Signorelli, director of special schools for the Los Angeles Unified School District. “Our district is very supportive of this kind of thing, because the best way to integrate handicapped children into a non-handicapped environment is through this kind of mainstreaming.”

The CHIME Project, which Cavallaro proposed three years ago, has been funded by the U.S. Department of Education. Gail Ruppert Houle, education program specialist with the department in Washington, said the program was chosen for funding over several other proposals.

“We felt the program at Cal State Northridge represented a best-practices situation for integration. It was based on sound research, it was multicultural and it stressed development of all skills--especially social skills--in one setting. Because of this, we felt the CHIME Project could be a workable model for other preschools in the state of California.”

Once the program was approved for the grant, Cavallaro and Joyce Hagen, chairwoman of the university’s department of education, met with the parents of children already attending the preschool and introduced the idea.

“I don’t remember any objections from the group,” Hagen said. “At our center, there is a mixture of races and ethnic backgrounds, but most of their parents are educated, and perhaps because of that, they are less prejudiced to the idea than another group of parents might have been.”

Today, after three years, Hagen said, the university is proud of the project and gets inquiries about it from other colleges across the country. Eventually, every university with a special education department and a preschool for students on campus may combine their efforts and develop programs of its own, Hagen said.

“It’s a real winner for everyone,” Hagen said. “But we are almost out of funds.”

The federal grant runs out Aug. 30, after which Cavallaro said she hopes to keep the program going with money from private and other sources. It will cost about $100,000 a year to continue the program, Cavallaro said.

If CHIME has enough money, directors will expand the program this fall to the preschool lab, another preschool on the CSUN campus. The preschool lab is especially for the children from the community, whereas the children’s center is designated primarily for children of CSUN students.

For visitors at CSUN’s children’s center, it is difficult to tell which children are disabled and which aren’t, Hagen said.

“And that’s pretty amazing, because some of them are very handicapped,” she said.

During playtime on a recent afternoon at the children’s center, six children--some disabled, some able-bodied--worked on puzzles at one table while four little girls tried on costume dresses in a nearby corner. Several college students seeking credit for student teaching helped organize the different groups of children while a full-time lead teacher supervised.

In another corner, three girls pretended to be ballerinas while the sound of “Edelweiss” drifted from an old record player. One of the girls was Katy.

“Come on, Katy,” said 4-year-old Elizabeth. “Let’s dance like this.”

Katy watched as Elizabeth and 3-year-old Jessica held on to a bookcase and gracefully lifted one of their legs waist-high. It took her a minute, but then Katy smiled and mimicked the movement.

Annie Cox, CHIME Project integration specialist, watched from across the room.

“The difference in Katy is that, before she started coming here, she never would have responded to those girls,” Cox said. “And now she’s right there, on the verge of being at the center of those kinds of activities.”

Cox is the on-site specialist who works with the children and their teachers to make the integration a smooth process. Of the children with autism at the center, Katy has made the most improvement, Cox said.

“She is a different little girl today because of CHIME,” Dicker said of her daughter. “She knows who I am, and she knows her daddy and her brother. She can walk up to me now and say, ‘Mommy, I want a drink, please.’ Before all she could do is cry and scream and throw a tantrum, but I never knew what she wanted.”

Dicker said that Katy remembers her old school, the one for autistic children, and she is adamantly opposed to ever returning there.

“She remembers the names of some of the kids, and she’ll say, ‘No so-and-so, Mommy. No so-and-so.’ She says it because she doesn’t want to be back with them,” Dicker said. “And recently, we were driving near the old school, and she recognized the street and started screaming and crying.”

It is obvious that Katy is thriving in a setting where children treat her like any other child and she can model her behavior after what is normal for her age, Cox said. Children under age 5 are too young to be prejudiced or afraid of a child who is different, she added.

“Autistic children do a lot of gesturing and rubbing their hands together,” Cox said. “And sometimes one of the children without special needs will imitate something one of the autistic children do. But we are trained to recognize that and direct them to notice other things about the disabled child.”

By pointing out the positive things disabled children can do and telling the children that it’s OK to be different, the integration specialist helps the group involved in the CHIME Project to get along quite nicely, Cox said.

While attending the CHIME Project, Katy has made several friends, including a 4-year-old girl named Sheila and a boy who recently invited her to his birthday party.

“Imagine if this was a widespread program, these children who are learning to include disabled children would become equally compassionate adults,” said Michele Haney, the CHIME Project assessment coordinator. “Imagine the difference for those people born with disabilities. Just look at Katy.”

After Katy finished dancing, she walked over to visit Sheila, who was drawing a picture. When Katy had gone on to something else, a visitor asked Sheila if Katy was any different from the other kids in the class.

Sheila tilted her head pensively. “Yes,” she shrugged. “See, Katy has blond hair, and I have brown hair. But my mommy has blond hair too. So I guess she isn’t that different.”