A Day of Winners : Games at Ventura School Bring Regular and Special-Education Classes Together

As 7-year-old Catherine Alburger and 8-year-old Heather Nichols squared off for a game of gladiator, they looked anything but evenly matched.

Not only did Catherine, who is tall for her age, tower over her older opponent, but Heather has a slightly shrunken right hand that forced her to wield her stuffed sword with only her left.

Predictably, Heather lost. But she did not go down without a fight.

And both girls came away from the game, held during a special field day Friday at Ventura’s Loma Vista School, saying they felt less self-conscious about their physical differences.

That was the point of the round of games at Loma Vista--bringing 300 students from regular summer-school classes together with 140 disabled youngsters to learn lessons of tolerance and acceptance.

Children from regular classes were grouped with youngsters who are blind, severely emotionally disturbed or otherwise disabled to play games that required them to work together.

The field day marked the first time that the Ventura Unified School District has brought regular and special education students together from different campuses during summer school.

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During the school year, many Ventura elementary schools teach physically and learning disabled children in classrooms that are next door or down the hall from regular classes. The two groups often mingle at recess and, under special arrangement, in classrooms. But even in those schools with special-education classes, most disabled students are of just one type.

In the summer, the district has traditionally kept regular students on one campus and disabled children on another because it is easier to keep track of different types of funding, educators said.

Friday’s field day mixed regular students with children who had disabilities ranging from severe emotional problems to deafness, said Linda Dubois, the summer school principal at Loma Vista.

“In summer school, we’re segregated,” said Andi Melvin, a teacher in the special-education classes, which are being held at Junipero Serra School.

But both regular and disabled students benefit from spending time together, Melvin said.

Children from regular classes serve as “role models for how to act socially appropriate” for the special-education students, Melvin said.

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And children who are not disabled become more comfortable with people who are.

“For normal children, it reduces their fears,” Melvin said. “It’s wonderful for kids with no handicaps to get perspective on their lives.”

At one point Friday, several girls from regular classes stood staring at another girl who sat on the grass, smiling and eating a Popsicle. The girl, her skin severely mottled, has Down’s syndrome.

“I feel really, really sad for her,” 7-year-old Kaytlin O’Dell said, as she and her friends turned away.

But Melvin said that if Kaytlin and her classmates had spent more time with the 9-year-old girl, they would have seen that she is happy and well-adjusted. “They could see she’s not sad.”

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The more that regular-education students are around those who are different, the more they consider them as individuals, Melvin said.

Some children seemed to be learning this lesson.

Second-grader Catherine Alburger said she feared jousting with disabled Heather Nichols at first. “I just thought I was going to hit her,” Catherine said. But after Heather put up such a fight, Catherine said she realized that Heather’s disability did not matter.

“She’s still a person. And people are different.”