COLUMN ONE : Another Fight to Integrate : The disabled are being ‘mainstreamed’ with new fervor in some school systems. Many teachers and parents say even the severely handicapped fare better in regular schools.

When Sarah Engelman talks about the education of her blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughter, her speech is peppered with the vernacular of the civil rights struggles of decades ago. She wants her daughter taught in an “integrated” setting, she says, instead of the segregated classrooms she was offered by the Los Angeles Unified School District.

But Engelman is not concerned about race. For her and millions of other parents of handicapped youngsters across the country, “integration” means putting their children on regular campuses alongside children without disabilities.

“A segregated classroom leads to a segregated life. And I want Alexis to be part of the real world,” said Engelman, whose 6-year-old daughter has a chromosomal anomaly that limits her mental and physical development.

Once called mainstreaming, the idea of putting disabled children in regular classes is not new.

But the push for integration has been taken up with a new fervor in some school systems by teachers, parents and advocates for the disabled, who cite scores of studies showing that even profoundly handicapped children fare better on regular campuses.

They make friends and learn social skills from other children, the research shows. And many of their parents have decided that is more important than the practical skills they might learn in the cloistered atmosphere of special education schools.

“I would love it if Alexis could learn to read and write and handle money so she could have a job,” said Engelman, “but realistically what I want for her is to get along with people, to learn to speak up for herself, to be able to enjoy herself at her sister’s birthday party.”

While some California school districts such as San Diego and San Francisco have embraced the notion of full inclusion of handicapped students, others like those in Los Angeles and Orange County are moving more slowly, responding to specific parent requests, but doing little to push alternatives to their special education schools.

Nationwide, as the integration movement picks up steam, some states, such as Vermont, Colorado, Oregon and Iowa, are closing their separate special education schools and placing handicapped students at regular schools--some in small, separate classes made up only of children with similar disabilities, and others sprinkled among nonhandicapped children in regular classes.

Students in both of those settings are considered “integrated” because they have opportunities to interact with non-handicapped children, either in class or during activities such as lunch or recess. Research cites benefits of placing handicapped children in either regular classrooms or in separate classrooms on regular campuses as long as they are allowed to interact with other students.

Still “segregated” are the children who attend separate special education schools, which handle students with the most severe physical, mental or emotional problems--children who were, as recently as 15 years ago, often denied a public school education at all.

For some of their parents, the separate schools represent a hard-won victory and a refuge from rejection and hostility.

“There’s a split among parents,” said Bonnie Clemans, whose teen-age, mentally retarded son attends a special education school in Azusa. “Some of us are still very protective; we feel it would be just as limiting to put a child with a peer group he can’t compete with and doesn’t identify with.”

There is no one right way to educate all handicapped children, contends Phillip Callison, assistant superintendent for special education for the Los Angeles Unified School District. “We’ve got everything from students who need just a little help with speech, to ones who are on a gurney and need somebody to check on them and see if they’re still breathing,” he said.

“A lot of these children are not going to get all the services they need in a regular classroom. When a regular teacher has to spend 40% of her time trying to teach a child who’s not going to learn anything anyway, everyone suffers.”

Required by a 1975 federal law to educate handicapped students, districts around the country created “special education” departments, with separate schools and programs for youngsters whose disabilities ranged from almost imperceptible learning problems, to severe mental and emotional disturbances, to physical handicaps, such as deafness or blindness.

Today in California about half of the most profoundly disabled children attend segregated schools.

In the 625,000-student Los Angeles district, more than 58,000 students are enrolled in special education programs. Of those, 5,000 attend the district’s 18 special education centers.

Orange County--which teaches about 1,000 of its 31,900 special education students in schools for the handicapped--took a major step toward integration with the opening in September of a San Juan Capistrano school built specifically to accommodate all students, including those who are severely handicapped.

The San Diego School Board voted last year to try to move all of the district’s handicapped students onto regular campuses by the 1995-96 school year in a comprehensive effort touted as a model for the rest of the state.

And in Ventura County, the Conejo Valley school district was ordered by state education officials in 1988 to transfer all 65 students from a county-run special education school to regular schools to provide integration opportunities.

Most school districts offer a range of educational options, with each child’s placement determined annually after an assessment by teachers, psychologists and parents, who devise a plan that spells out such things as what the child should learn and how much time should be spent with non-handicapped students.

But some parents say they are not told about the option of putting their children in regular classes.

“It’s like you go to a restaurant and you’re given a menu, but there are choices available that are not on the menu so you don’t know to ask for them,” said Eileen Cassidy, who heads the local office of the Developmental Disabilities Board, a state agency that monitors programs for people with disabilities.

Placement decisions must be approved by school officials and parents, but Cassidy said administrators often tout the advantages of segregated placement, with its small, intimate classes and specialized instruction and services.

“It’s very inviting,” said Engelman. “The whole idea that she’s better protected, she’ll get more attention. . . . They feed you into the special ed system, leading you to think it’s better for your child.”

Keeping her daughter in a busy classroom with up to 30 other students has “been rough at times,” admits Engelman, who hired an aide to help Alexis in her kindergarten classroom when the district refused to provide one.

“School is hard for her. She’s all right when she’s there, but sometimes she gets in the car (after school) and starts sobbing and I wonder if I’m doing the right thing.”

But experts say the evidence is irrefutable that disabled children taught in integrated settings display better social development and a higher mastery of skills than segregated students.

“Prior to 1978, if a child was severely disabled it was felt he should be taught whatever you could teach him in a secure environment, then when he reached 21, hand him over to a day activity program where he could make baskets or ceramics,” said Wayne Sailor, a San Francisco State professor recognized nationally as an expert on integration.

“Now we realize that by enhancing a child’s social development, you maximize his chances to learn more sophisticated skills.”

Connie Lapin of Northridge said she bought the separate-is-better argument 17 years ago and kept her autistic son “isolated” in special education classes all his life. The youth, now 22, lives in a group home with several other autistic adults.

“It was the biggest mistake I could have made,” said Lapin, who heads state schools Supt. Bill Honig’s advisory committee on special education. “The small classes, the extra attention . . . it all sounded so good. But what are the kids going to learn in a situation like that, with six other autistic kids as models?

“If I’d had him in a normal environment, my son wouldn’t have been cured, but he would have been a lot happier. Can you imagine how good it would have felt for him to just make a friend?”

In practice, the integration of handicapped children is often difficult. Some are disruptive, others out of touch with what goes on around them. Many need aides to keep them tuned in to classroom activities and others need medical assistance or help with physical tasks.

“It’s not just a matter of having ramps and special restroom facilities,” explained Carol Arnesen, director of special eduction for the Orange County Department of Education.

“Sometimes it’s special medical equipment, changing tables for older children who are incontinent, specialized cafeteria services because many are tube fed. . . . It’s like running a mini-hospital and in many cases it’s just not practical to (adapt) a regular classroom.”

But in San Diego, school officials are working to do just that, as they try to move even the most severely handicapped students onto regular campuses.

“When we first proposed it three or four years ago, there was panic,” recalled Jack Fleck, the district’s assistant director of special education. “Principals wanted to know what they were going to do with these (handicapped) kids and how the regular ed kids were going to react.”

In fact, there has been little opposition expressed by either regular education students or their parents in San Diego and other districts.

School officials say that is because they typically meet with teachers and parents to explain the integration process. And parents of handicapped students often go out of their way to smooth their children’s paths--offering to meet with PTAs and student groups to answer questions and dispel parents’ fears.

But other parents say their disabled children are sometimes made scapegoats by parents of non-handicapped students for problems that arise in regular classrooms. “If their kids start having problems, it’s because the teachers gave that handicapped kid too much time,” Clemans said. “No one wants to say it to you, but you know that kind of resentment exists.”

Young children seem to accept their new handicapped classmates well, but it is sometimes difficult for teen-age students to find acceptance, unless they have been in regular classes over the years and already made friends among their non-handicapped peers, parents and teachers say.

“At Alexis’ age, the kids notice that she’s different, but they don’t hold it against her,” said Engelman, whose daughter receives the same birthday party invitations her non-handicapped classmates do. “What I hope is the friends she makes now will still be her friends when she’s 16.”

Even some pioneering parents confess, however, to doubts about the wisdom of integration.

“It’s difficult and it’s scary,” said Karen Pekarcik, whose 6-year-old daughter with Down’s syndrome spent kindergarten in a special education class with eight other retarded children in the Pomona School District but moved to a regular first-grade class this fall.

“We’ve always included Molly in everything our family’s done,” said Pekarcik. “But our daughter is mentally retarded; there’s no way we can say she’s like the other kids.”

The initial cost of adapting schools to accept handicapped children is high--particularly given the small number of disabled children who benefit from the changes and the competing needs faced by financially strapped districts.

But studies show that in the long run it is more cost-efficient to educate all handicapped children at regular schools, minimizing costly bus service to special programs and the need for a student-teacher ratio that often approaches 3 to 1.

The Los Angeles district recently agreed to build a ramp at an elementary school to settle a lawsuit on behalf of a wheelchair-bound 4-year-old who was barred from attending her neighborhood school and was to be bused to a school three miles away--one of 40 in the district equipped for wheelchairs.

But Callison said it would cost the district $1 billion to make all 600 of its campuses wheelchair accessible, and millions more to equip the schools with all the services severely handicapped students need. The district last year spent $490 million of its almost $4-billion budget on special education services, he said.

Another stumbling block in California’s move toward integration is what to do with the special education centers that would no longer be needed. The state was a national leader 25 years ago in providing expensive, specially equipped schools for its handicapped children.

Last year, the Los Angeles Board of Education, prodded by complaints that the district was not moving quickly enough to integrate all handicapped students, appointed a team to study its special education system. Its report is due out this year.

But Callison said it is unlikely Los Angeles will attempt to close its special education centers or equip all campuses to handle disabled students.

“It’s like a pendulum (that) swings back and forth,” he said. “Stick around for a while. You’ll find all the school districts . . . that closed their (special education) schools are wishing they’d left them open.”