Making a Difference : Education: Braille, hearing aids and backward sentences are some of the ways students experience disabilities.

Having trouble reading this?

If you had a learning disability, that’s an example of how the words above might appear to you. You would find it very difficult to read. But that wouldn’t mean you were stupid.

That’s the thrust of Differences, a program in Beverly Hills schools that brings backward sentences, Braille Monopoly and hearing aids to third-graders.

The program, developed and presented by the school district’s special education staff, aims to cultivate the youngsters’ awareness of disabled people by letting the students experience handicaps.

At a recent session at Beverly Vista School, the third-graders plunged into a series of exercises that illustrated mental, learning, orthopedic, hearing and visual disabilities. The exercises were set up at five tables in the auditorium.

Differences are good, the program coordinators, who are called resource specialists, explained by way of introduction. What if every child had the same color of eyes and hair and “liked all the same things you liked--the same TV shows . . . and the same kind of jelly on their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?” they asked the children. Life would be pretty dull, the children agreed.

A handicap, the specialists continued, is simply “a difference which makes it harder for that person to do something that is easy for you to do.” It can be as ordinary as a broken arm. And handicaps aren’t contagious, they added.

“When children are blind, they like to play games just like you do,” said resource specialist Linda DiNoble, as the students ran their hands over the dots of Park Place and Luxury Tax on the Braille Monopoly game.

Their hands pounced again to the nubs in a Bugs Bunny book and a Braille dictionary, and they oohed when DiNoble punched in a student’s name on a Braille typewriter.

DiNoble gave them pointers on etiquette around guide dogs: Don’t rush up and make a fuss over them, because “they’re working. You need to just look at those from a distance.”

Stewart Wiley, 8, was puzzled why blind people seem to move their heads every which way. “We think eye contact is real important--they don’t,” DiNoble said.

“You know how Stevie Wonder sings? He moves his head around a lot. He’s feeling the rhythm of the music,” she said.

There were distorted-vision glasses and a hearing aid to try on. “What?!” exclaimed Sam Taratoot, swiveling his head to see his surroundings in the new--and blurry--light. He tried to color in a baseball on a piece of paper--but was seeing two foggy baseballs.

For some people with learning disabilities, “their hand wants to go one way, but the brain says another way,” explained Betsy Applebaum, a specialist.

Another of her colleagues, Linda Thaler, instructed students to try to write the numbers one through five on a piece of paper as they held the paper to their foreheads. They were startled and dismayed at their products--backwards, upside-down gobbledygook. That’s what a mentally handicapped person might do, Thaler said. “They might see it the way you see it on the blackboard, but when they try to copy it, it may be real hard,” she said.

At another table, it was finger calisthenics: “Wrap your thumb around,” “Get the other fingers out of the way,” said specialist Lindi Weinstein, leading the group through signing the alphabet and phrases such as “how are you.”

Eighth-grader Bebo Saab was on hand to explain his cerebral palsy. “You guys are supposed to be in your mom’s stomach 9 months. I was in my mother’s stomach 6 1/2 months,” he stated matter of factly. “When I was born, I had brain damage. That doesn’t mean my brain went cuckoo or anything”--a few children giggled nervously--”It got paralyzed.”

“Have you seen ‘My Left Foot’? That guy’s got cerebral palsy. Luckily, mine is not that bad,” said Bebo, who takes all classes but physical education with other eighth-graders.

One girl wondered if his motorized wheelchair was anything like an amusement-park ride. “You might think it’s fun, but it’s my leg,” Bebo replied. “I’d rather walk.”

“I can eat . . . brush my hair, think, do my homework,” but need help showering and going to the bathroom, he said.

“I play Nintendo, talk on the telephone, visit my friends”--who are not handicapped, Bebo said. “We like to do everything you guys like to do--go to Beverly Center, Westwood, Magic Mountain, Disneyland,” he said, adding that he is lifted from his wheelchair into the rides.

And Bebo made it clear that he doesn’t appreciate stares. “All you have to do is ask me questions. What do you get from staring?”

In an interview afterward, Bebo said that at the start of the school year other students tend to gawk at him, and he is usually the one to break the ice. “In the course of the school year, it (the interaction between him and his classmates) becomes normal.”

Bebo has spoken to scores of third-graders for Differences, but said he does not feel he’s a curio on display. “I don’t really think I have a handicap. . . . I feel like I’m a volunteer, I am a volunteer. I’m helping (other students who) should know what handicaps are and not be afraid.”

The Beverly Hills Unified School District has eight resource specialists working with Bebo and the other 400 disabled students, who make up 8.6% of the district’s total enrollment. The students have various kinds and degrees of handicaps. Some, such as Bebo, attend mainstream classes nearly all the time. Others spend all of their day in separate special education classes.

One of the most painful problems handicapped children face is “the way they’re looked at by their peers. . . . ‘Oh, you’re dumb, you’re stupid,’ ” said Dee Dee Graves, the district’s special education program specialist. “It’s a very difficult feeling of self that some of our students with handicaps have to live through.”

One tactic is to teach the disabled students rebuttals, such as, “I’m not stupid, I have a learning difficulty,” she said.

Another is to expose other students to the disabled “so they learn to be more tolerant and understanding,” Graves said--and thus the Differences program was conceived five years ago.

Third-graders are targeted because they’re at an age “old enough to get into the dialogue and have some understanding, but young enough to make an impression,” Graves said.

At the request of teachers in the district, resource specialist Weinstein visits classrooms throughout the year to follow up with more exercises, lessons and answers.

Ideally, Weinstein said, children should be able to learn from their parents how to react to a handicapped person--provided, of course, that the parents know. “Hopefully, you start it early enough, and (the children) can practice it later in life.”

Other Westside public schools have had similar programs, but Beverly Hills’ is the most formalized and comprehensive. At Santa Monica High School on Friday, some students and staff will spend their lunch hour in wheelchairs. In the past, there have been puppet shows, videotapes and a Differences-type program to make grade-school students more aware of handicaps, but lately these have had to be scaled back because of budget cuts.

Similarly, a “traveling road show” to elementary schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District was a victim of budget cutting a couple of years ago, said Phil Callison, assistant superintendent in the special education division. But for annual Handicapped Awareness Week, the first week of November, each school gets a package of suggested lesson plans, including a list of “Famous People with Handicaps” and reading lists.

The Beverly Vista students said the program was an eye-opener.

“If I have a friend who was . . . deaf, I could speak to him,” said Joshua Mann, waving a handout diagram of sign language. He added that he does have a friend in his neighborhood who cannot walk.

When he sees people with wheelchairs or canes, “I feel sort of sad because they don’t do everything we do,” he said.

Sam Taratoot, who had been taken aback by his experience with blurred vision, said that he now realizes that handicaps can be mild ones. “I thought it was very hard to be handicapped, (that it was) having to work a lot and it hurts.”

But he and some other children said they still were a bit uneasy around handicapped people.

“I try not to look at them . . . because it makes me feel like I’m making fun of them,” Sam said.

“Just because they have problems, you shouldn’t make fun of them,” Stewart Wiley added.

“It gives me kind of chills. It’s kind of scary--because one day it might happen to you.”