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COLUMN ONE : Crack’s Children Grow Up : The first wave of youngsters prenatally exposed to cocaine is expected to hit an ill-prepared education system this year.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Five years after crack cocaine exploded in American cities, public school systems are bracing for a grim harvest this fall: an influx of school-age children who suffer learning disabilities because their mothers exposed them prenatally to drugs.

With many education budgets already stretched to the breaking point, administrators despair of finding the money, staff and training to provide the special help these children will need to succeed in school.

“We expect an explosion,” said Garnett Pinkney, who is helping organize a pilot teaching program for drug-exposed children in the 81,300-student Washington, D.C., public school system.

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Los Angeles, which has one of the nation’s only public school programs for such children, receives daily calls from desperate districts across the country searching for help and information, said Phillip Callison, assistant superintendent for the Los Angeles Unified School District’s special education division.

But even that program only reaches a fraction of the children who need help, Callison conceded.

Callison and other educators fear that unless comprehensive steps are taken nationwide, a generation could be lost--one that the educational system alone cannot save.

“It’s society’s problem,” Callison said. “Public health has to deal with it, mental health, hospitals and welfare agencies.”

No one knows exactly how many drug-damaged children are already enrolled or headed for first grade, but educators believe that this fall will bring the first big wave of such children into the schools. If current trends continue, the federal Department of Health and Human Services estimates that there will be about 4 million cocaine-exposed children and babies in 10 years who will require billions of dollars in special services.

Medical research into the prenatal effects of drugs and educational studies on how to teach drug-exposed children are still in the early stages. In addition, it is often impossible to separate prenatal drug damage from the environmental problems bred by poverty, abuse and neglect.

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But experts agree that children exposed prenatally to drugs can suffer from a host of emotional, physiological and neurological problems that linger long after a newborn undergoes withdrawal. Symptoms range from mental retardation and convulsions in the most extreme cases to poor motor and cognitive skills, hyperactivity, speech defects, an inability to concentrate or remember, violence, apathy and lack of emotion.

“Sometimes, it’s as if they haven’t been socialized,” said Oakland Unified School Supt. Pete Mesa, who estimated that up to six youngsters in each first-grade class in the district already exhibit behavior ranging from violence to near autism.

At the Salvin Special Education Center in Los Angeles, one of three locations where UCLA pediatricians and teachers have showered small groups of drug-exposed children with individual attention, some educational strategies are beginning to emerge.

Teachers have found that children exposed prenatally to drugs are easily overwhelmed by too many people or toys and too much noise or movement. Often, they play by scattering, batting or picking up and putting down toys rather than combining them in patterns and engaging in fantasy play, said Dr. Judy Howard, a clinical professor of pediatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine.

To compensate, teachers introduce new concepts slowly, accompanied by exaggerated physical or verbal cues. Teachers have also found that many children bloom under the extra attention. For children who have spent their lives shuttling from foster homes to group care homes, a nurturing teacher may provide the only consistent security and love they have ever known.

The price tag for such care is high: Los Angeles Unified spends $15,000 on teachers, pediatricians, speech therapists, aides and social workers to educate each of the 20 Salvin children for one year, compared to the $4,000 it costs to educate an average child.

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Although the entire Los Angeles pilot program includes only 30 to 40 children, it still puts the district ahead of most other large, urban school systems.

Districts such as Oakland, for example, place drug-exposed disabled children in special education programs, but there are long waiting lists. Others say that wherever possible, these children should be taught in regular classrooms--but with fewer students and more teacher aides.

The 970,000-student New York City public school system is working on special programs for drug-exposed children, said James Vlasto, press secretary to Chancellor Joseph A. Fernandez. But “we need more school psychologists, we need more funding,” he said.

Chicago officials “don’t have any idea of the size of the problem,” said Stanley McConner, director of substance abuse programs for the the city’s public school system, the third-largest district in the country, behind New York and Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Unified, by contrast, has been identifying drug-exposed children and drawing up teaching strategies for the last three years with the help of hospitals, teachers and parents. While many of the Salvin children were born addicted to crack, some suffer from prenatal alcohol syndrome and others were born to users of multiple drugs and alcohol. The program was started after UCLA’s Howard contacted the Los Angeles school district to say she was seeing growing numbers of drug-addicted babies who would probably suffer learning disabilities when they entered school.

Today, district officials call the Salvin environment “ideal” and plan to send its teachers into other schools one afternoon a week this fall to share what they have learned.

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But it will be years before they reach the city’s hundreds of elementary schools.

And the $15,000 being spent per student doesn’t buy a miracle cure. Salvin teachers insist that the homespun tactics of early intervention, nurturing care and individual attention are the keys. The school has one teacher and two aides for every eight children. Experts also stress the importance of compiling the child’s history, which can shed light on specific problems and help teachers and doctors come up with solutions.

“One of the main goals . . . is to have the kids bond with at least one staff member,” said teacher Marci Schoenbaum, who works with drug-exposed children at the Salvin campus near Interstate 10 and Vermont Avenue.

One 5-year-old now at the Salvin school offers proof of how a life can be salvaged. Born to a crack-using mother who lived in an abandoned car, the girl was premature and “terribly addicted” at birth, said Mary Jones, her Salvin teacher.

As a baby, she was left with neighbors and relatives while her mother went in search of drugs, and she was physically and sexually abused. Eventually, she was placed in a group home for children, arriving at Salvin three years ago like a limp and battered rag doll.

Today, the girl brims with inquisitive intelligence. She helps slower children interpret and answer questions, and runs up to play with a visitor’s purse, offering a beaming smile. She also takes classes in piano and ballet and her teachers boast that she is the class star.

Teachers spend a lot of time developing play skills, a precursor to more formal learning. On a recent day, children fed beans to rubber dinosaurs and colored with crayons, trying laboriously to stay within the lines. Others dropped their toys in mid-play, racing off to scramble up the jungle gym. One boy pedaled his tricycle straight into a wall.

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Suddenly, one 5-year-old boy let out a yelp and grabbed the arm of his playmate to prevent her from taking the Tyrannosaurus rex.

“He will hide the dinosaur rather than share it,” Jones said with a sigh, adding that the boy was raised by three stepfathers and their five girlfriends because his natural mother was hooked on crack.

“He’s due to start kindergarten next year and he doesn’t begin to have playing skills,” she continued. “He’s very angry but he doesn’t have the tools to tell you about it. His speech is damaged; he can’t find the right word.”

Many teachers and doctors who work with drug-exposed children feel strongly that such students should not be isolated in special education programs, despite their learning difficulties.

“We can provide for their needs in regular school if we . . . provide an environment that’s loving and more flexible,” said Theadora deSoyza, who runs the Miriam deSoyza Learning Center in the Bronx, a nonprofit school for the disabled that works with increasing numbers of drug-exposed children. DeSoyza founded the school in 1971 and named it after her daughter, Miriam, who suffers from Down’s syndrome.

DeSoyza also warned against the danger of stigmatizing children with labels such as “crack baby,” which she said contributes to a climate of fear and ignorance.

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“The school districts are scared to death; you’d think they were getting monsters or something,” DeSoyza said.

Researchers know that cocaine restricts the flow of blood from the mother to the fetus through the placenta. In addition, the effects of a mother’s alcohol and tobacco use on the fetus have been explored in some detail. But much remains unknown about how cocaine and other hard drugs damage organs and the nervous system, and why some babies are affected while other are not harmed.

Doctors say some children may recover completely with early help and special attention. But others will have lifelong problems no matter how much intervention they get, said Dr. Rachelle Tyler of UCLA’s School of Medicine, the pediatrician who works most closely with the Salvin children.

“They have small heads, small brains, small stature. That’s what you have psychologically to work with and you can’t put any more in there,” she said.

In addition, “a child could look perfectly normal through second grade, and the type of effects coke has on the nervous system won’t surface till . . . 8 years of age,” said Dr. Dan Griffith, a developmental psychologist with the National Assn. for Perinatal Addiction Research and Education who has tracked a group of 300 drug-exposed babies for four years.

Moreover, working with the children is only half the battle, educators and doctors said. To break the cycle of addiction, they said it is also necessary to treat the child’s parents.

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In her UCLA study, Howard found that troubled families often have a history of impoverishment, abuse and chemical dependency that spans generations.

One mother in Howard’s study related that her mother mixed drinks for her as a child, saying: “Drink this; it will make you feel better.”

Another explained how her own father “shot me up with heroin when I threatened to call the cops on him.”

As an example of what can happen when a community does become motivated, educators cite a program planned for Washington.

The three-pronged effort starts in hospitals at birth, when drug-exposed children, many of whom are known as “boarder babies” because they have been removed from their drug-abusing mothers or abandoned, are identified and tracked through the maze of medical, court, social service and foster care programs.

To cope with educating these children, the district will launch a pilot program this December to design teaching strategies. Lastly, school officials have expanded their preventive education in hopes that it will persuade students not to mix pregnancy with drugs and alcohol.

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“We didn’t want to wait until it hit us and teachers were overwhelmed,” said Pinkney, executive assistant for special populations for the Washington public school system.

But teachers, prenatal physicians and child psychologists say much more needs to be done.

“The bottom line is we need smaller classroom settings and more aides, but how that can be accomplished I don’t know,” UCLA’s Tyler said.

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