State Alleges Special-Ed Bias at 1 School in Montebello : Education: Officials say students are getting less class time than others and no chance to mingle or play with non-handicapped students.

State education officials have accused the Montebello Unified School District of discriminating against handicapped students at one of its elementary schools.

Special-education students at Rosewood Park Elementary School have been scheduled for shorter school days than other children, a violation of state law, state investigators found. Class schedules for special-education students also are arranged in such a way that the students are isolated and cannot play with non-handicapped children their own age, the investigation by the state Department of Education determined.

State law requires that handicapped students be given the opportunity to play with other students of the same age as often as possible.

Both handicapped and non-handicapped children share the campus of Rosewood Park Elementary, which serves students from kindergarten through the fourth grade. According to the investigator’s March 19 report, 75 handicapped children, including 16 teen-agers, attend classes in bungalows in a corner of the school campus. The children, who have such disabilities as cerebral palsy, Down’s syndrome and autism, start classes 45 minutes before the 488 non-handicapped students at the school and leave an hour and 40 minutes earlier.

As a result, the investigator reported, handicapped children at Rosewood receive about an hour less instruction and there is “little or no opportunity” for special-education students to play with other students before, during or after school.

The district has 45 days to submit a plan to the state describing how the deficiencies will be corrected at Rosewood.

Charles Bell, the district’s director of guidance and special education, said district officials plan to eliminate the shorter school days for special-education classes by September, and will move older handicapped students to an intermediate school.

“We knew we had to make some changes,” he said. “The inference is that the district has somehow consciously hurt these children. That is not the case. The district has made a continuing commitment to to make these changes.”

More than 2,000 children attend special-education classes at Montebello schools, and except at Rosewood Park, the district’s special-education programs comply with state laws, Bell said.

Until recently, Rosewood was the only district school serving the most severly handicapped children, which contributed to the scheduling problems, Bell said. “We had to collect the kids from all over the district, and that took time,” Bell said.

The district also serves Bell Gardens, Commerce and parts of East Los Angeles, Monterey Park, Pico Rivera, and south San Gabriel Valley.

Once the children were dropped off at school, the buses had to be used for the regular routes, Bell said.

He added that despite the state’s finding, many Rosewood special-education students receive nearly as many minutes of instruction as other students because their lunch hour is counted as a class lesson.

The state allows the lunch period to be considered a lesson for handicapped children who, for example, do not know how to order from a menu or eat at a cafeteria. But the state investigation found that, even with the lunch hour included as a lesson, Rosewood special-education students spend 15 fewer minutes in class than their nonhandicapped peers.

Shorter days and the district’s practice of keeping teen-agers on the same campus with children as young as 3 have angered some parents of special-education students. Parents of children in Montebello special-education programs or in county programs at district schools plan to appear before the Montebello Board of Education tonight to complain.

“No matter how severly handicapped they are, they have a right to have the opportunity to an education, to play with other children,” said Marty Preciado, whose daughter Mia, 12, attends Rosewood.

Montebello Unified School district officials began working on changes at Rosewood before the state investigation, Bell said. The district discovered the Rosewood deficiencies while conducting its own review of special-education programs in January, Bell said. The state Department of Education’s special-education division began its investigation in March after receiving a complaint from an advocate of special-education children.