Undoing the Damage : At a Cal State Dominguez Hills development center, handicapped children--many the offspring of women who used drugs during pregnancy--are given a fighting chance.

Two-year-old Jasmine, a doe-eyed fashion plate in pink cotton sweats, drops tiny plastic bears one-by-one into a baby bottle, then upends it, dumping the bears into a brightly colored heap on the floor.

For Jasmine, one of 60 children attending the Infant-Toddler Development Center at Cal State Dominguez Hills, upending the bottle is a small but sweet victory.

She used to try to fish the bears out of the bottle with her finger, a sign her development is delayed--her ability to reason and remember narrowed--perhaps forever limited by the drugs her mother used during pregnancy.

“It’s a cognitive thing,” said the center’s head teacher, Linda Dingman. Other children figure out earlier than drug babies, such as Jasmine and her twin sister, Janet, that the best way to retrieve the bears is to upend the bottle.

The Infant-Toddler Center, founded 16 years ago by Doris Okada, a special education expert on the university faculty, is for developmentally disabled preschool children. That term used to refer only to children with handicaps such as cerebral palsy and Down’s syndrome.

Today, however, the center, and others like it around the state, are filled with the offspring of women who used drugs during pregnancy.

“When I came six years ago,” Dingman said, “there were one or two. Now, it’s about half of our program.”

“We get more and more every year,” said Okada.

The largely state-funded center was created as a laboratory for Okada’s special education students. Now, it is just as much a community service, given its location on a campus surrounded by neighborhoods blighted with the drug trafficking that mushroomed after crack cocaine hit inner-city streets in the mid-1980s.

Fifteen of the 30 children enrolled in the afternoon session at the Dominguez Hills center have been mentally or physically impaired by drugs that seeped into their systems before they drew their first breath.

Only one of the 15 is in the custody of his natural mother. The rest are in foster homes or in the homes of relatives, largely grandmothers, making it hard to sort out which of their behavior and emotional problems are drug-induced and which are environmental.

“This little boy has violent outbursts,” said Dingman, looking toward a now sunny 2-year-old, wheeling a plastic fire truck back and forth across the top of a counter.

“It’s not that he’s bad. He’s still going through active drug withdrawal,” Dingman said.

The outbursts have become less frequent since the child started coming to the center every afternoon, but there is no way of telling, she said, if they will disappear altogether.

“I’d hate to have him go through the rest of his life like that. It’s not fair,” she said.

Then there is Diashawn, a quiet 2 1/2-year-old with the features of a prizefighter planted on a face of permanent sadness. When a recent visitor to the center picked him up one day last week, his countenance suddenly gave way to a broad grin, which staff members rushed to observe.

Despite continued efforts, they had never been able to make the little boy smile before, nor does he cry, even when his foster mother drops him off at the center each day.

That lack of expressiveness is a trait of drug babies, along with hyperactivity, violent outbursts and delayed development in coordination, language and social skills, said Dingman and Okada.

Children exposed to drugs in utero also lack the sense of wonder and curiosity that other children exhibit in the toddler stage.

“Many times they don’t know how to choose between toys . . . ,” Dingman said. Unlike normal toddlers, who will spend time exploring a particular toy or object, these children will just dump them off the shelves and walk away, she said.

Okada is credited with having created one of the area’s premier preschool centers for developmentally disabled children between the ages of 14 and 36 months.

“I would say she ranks among the top,” said Carolyn Jackson, director of the South-Central Los Angeles Regional Center, one of the quasi-public agencies through which the state administers programs for the developmentally disabled.

All of the children who come to the Dominguez Hills center are referred by the regional center. The university contributes land and facilities.

What Dingman and Okada and their staff of more than 10 aim to do is to speed up the development of the children, the oldest of whom are now entering the public schools.

Nationally, an estimated 375,000 children a year are being born to women who abuse drugs during pregnancy.

To counteract the damage done by the drugs, children at the Dominguez Hills center do such seemingly simple tasks as walk up and down stairs, an exercise that improves their coordination.

Because almost all are language-impaired, they are taught basic sign language when they first arrive, allowing them to understand and communicate while they learn to talk. They have snacks, learning to chew and swallow well, a skill they often lack because they got used to pureed food.

To develop their sensory awareness, they play with fuzzy pieces of carpet and soft stuffed animals. To develop cognitive skills they might play, under the eyes of a teacher, with the bottle and the bears. To develop hand-eye coordination, they stack blocks.

“They come in mouthing the blocks,” said Okada. “By the time they leave some of them can stack 10 blocks.” The average 36-month-old is expected to be able to stack at least eight, Okada said.

The center has an annual budget of about $250,000, not lavish, but certainly larger than the $5,000 university grant Okada started with in 1976. She had six children in that program and used a college classroom as the playroom.

“I used to bring food from home. I brought my daughter’s toys,” Okada said, recalling how she had to move desks and chairs out of the classroom each day to make room for the preschoolers.

The future for drug babies is largely uncharted territory because it is such a new phenomenon. There is simply not enough data to know how they fare later in life, academically and emotionally.

“The only hope for these children is early intervention programs,” Okada said, adding that she is confident, regardless of what happens to them later, that the center is making a difference in their lives.

“I think we get a lot of reinforcement from seeing what the children can do,” Okada said.