San Diego Schools Offer Lessons on Disabled for L.A.

Five years after embarking on a plan to aggressively integrate disabled children into regular classes, the San Diego City Unified School District sends these warnings to Los Angeles Unified as it begins a similar landmark undertaking this week:

Parents: Expect your disabled children to receive fewer support services than promised and don’t assume that your fight for equal treatment is over the day that they begin school in a regular classroom.

Teachers: Expect little or no training and less administrative and academic backing than you feel you need as disabled children are moved into your classes.

Administrators: Expect parent complaints and union skirmishes and don’t count on integration alone to get government investigators off your backs.

When Los Angeles officials settled a class-action lawsuit Monday aimed at improving the education of disabled students, they took on a goal filled with challenges. With the filing of a hefty court document, they embraced the latest trend in special education mainstreaming or “inclusion”--the paper-simple but practically daunting process of bringing disabled students home to their neighborhood schools.

And San Diego’s experiences not only validate percolating local concerns but provide an insight into potential solutions.

“It is going to be a horrendous thing to try to stay on top of in Los Angeles, to put out fires and still be proactive in developing programs,” said Jack Fleck, San Diego’s assistant director of exceptional programs. “We’ve had some big success stories, but there have been a lot of disasters too.”

Although the districts differ in size by a factor of five--Los Angeles enrolls 650,000 students, San Diego, 130,000--in each about one in 10 students requires some form of special education.

In San Diego today, nearly all students with physical, mental and emotional disabilities spend part of their school day alongside non-disabled peers.

At the end of this school year, San Diego’s sixth special education school will close, leaving just one serving about 100 emotionally disturbed children. And only a few separate special education classrooms remain at regular schools.

Because students who attend separate schools tend to be the most severely disabled, every campus closure triggered panic not only among the parents of disabled students, but also among the parents of regular students, who feared that teachers would divert too much attention to the disabled children.

“Some parents were very against having our kids with their normal kids . . . and that worried me,” recalled Sabrina Trumbach, who lost her fight to prevent her brain-damaged daughter, Tiffany, from being moved when her special school was shut down three years ago.

The proposed closure of the special education sites in Los Angeles has been equally controversial. In response to protests from special education school parents, the district softened language in its legal settlement that suggested that 18 special education schools could be phased out. However, district officials have made it clear that integrating the students from those centers remains a priority.

Even for those simply moving from segregated to regular classrooms in San Diego, the transfer produced mixed results.

It could not have occurred at a better time for Nate Artis, a kindergartner with autism whose mother despaired that he had begun mimicking the behavior problems of peers in his special education class.

At first Sandra Artis was told that Nate would not flourish in a regular kindergarten, but as the reforms rippled through the school system, she found a more receptive audience. Nate ultimately was accepted at the school across the street from their Mid-City San Diego apartment.

The timing could not have been worse, however, for 10-year-old Luke Coughlin, coming just a year after he entered his first special education classroom because of a head injury suffered in an auto accident. Mainstreaming landed Luke in a regular fifth grade, where he was given regular fifth-grade work.

“He was only at second- or third-grade level, but they were not modifying his work,” said his mother, Mary Larimore.

Last fall, Larimore pulled Luke out of school to teach him at home.

The mainstreaming, or “inclusion,” movement, which has gained credibility across the country in the past decade, is rooted in two goals: to provide normal social contact for disabled children and to improve their academic achievement.

The reality is that few school districts begin the journey for either of those reasons.

Sometimes the impetus is a lawsuit. In Los Angeles, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action suit, contending that the district’s treatment of special education students was separate and unequal.

In others, such as San Diego, the catalyst was less clear-cut. The school board’s decision to mainstream came a year after deep budget cuts in special education. District administrators say the two decisions were unrelated. Parents remain skeptical.

“Our conclusion is it was all financial, because the district fought [mainstreaming] and fought it and fought it and when money got short, they dumped all these . . . kids into regular classes without notifying parents,” said Mary Ann Golembesky, the parent of a disabled graduate of the system who organized more than 30 parents to file formal complaints against the district in 1994.

Golembesky’s efforts triggered investigations by the state Department of Education and the federal Office of Civil Rights, which was already looking into a prior complaint. Both agencies found that disabled students had been moved into regular education classes without adequate evaluation, parent choice or teacher preparation.

Once there, investigators found that students frequently received less therapy, tutoring or remedial assistance than was guaranteed in the individual education plans that districts craft for disabled students.

Rachel Yanke’s third-grade son Matthew, for instance, was supposed to spend five hours a week with a special education teacher for help with a learning disability similar to dyslexia. When Matthew languished at the La Jolla school, Yanke started keeping her own record of his time with the teacher, logging about 45 minutes a week.

“She had included days when I had him home sick,” Yanke said. “I can accept that they can’t provide everything for the child. . . . But the lying I can’t take.”

Frustration, Yanke said, heightened Matthew’s hyperactivity. One day, she visited his class and discovered that his teacher had taped his arms to his body. She filed a grievance that the district settled by paying for Matthew to attend private school.

The dearth of checks and balances to prevent such problems concerned the state and federal investigators who visited San Diego. Their worry is shared by many Los Angeles parents.

“I do not trust this district,” said Liz Spencer, a Westside Los Angeles parent who pushed for more safeguards in the settlement. “History has shown us they will not do it right unless they have to.”

A much-lauded solution in San Diego is an itinerant teacher program--developed with San Diego State University--where nine special education teachers oversee the 85 severely disabled students assigned full time to regular classes at regular schools.

The program’s success relies on people such as Phyllis Perlroth, who travels daily from campus to campus with a fat box of student files in her car trunk.

The roving teachers are equal parts coach, advisor and monitor for the regular instructors charged with educating special education students. For the students and parents, they are confidant, advocate and, at times, punching bag.

“They have the job from hell,” said Michele Berry, the district administrator who heads inclusion of the severely disabled.

But the itinerants consider themselves ambassadors for change, seeing major victories in small advances--a second-grader learning to write her name, a teacher using some of the simplified lessons that they have developed.

Occasionally, when confronted with truly disturbing stories, even the itinerants question whether any giant school district can accommodate such drastic change. Such was Perlroth’s quandary the day she learned that an emotionally disturbed girl had bolted from her first-grade classroom into a busy street, then pummeled the principal on her return to school.

“I’ll be real honest with you, a few of the sites I oversee are not the best environments for these [disabled] kids,” Perlroth said. “But it’s not because the kids don’t fit in or other kids don’t accept them. It’s because of the adults.”

The underlying problem, parents and disabled advocates say, is that there are not enough Perlroths to monitor the widely scattered special education students.

That shortcoming is exacerbated by San Diego’s decentralization, similar to LEARN reforms in Los Angeles, which allows each campus to decide how to accommodate the newly mainstreamed students.

“In the old days, we told schools, ‘This is what the law says and here’s how to do it,’ ” Fleck said. “Now you’ve got to say, ‘This is what the law says, show us how you’re going to do it.’ ”

Sometimes, that autonomy has led to failures.

At Madison High School in San Diego’s Claremont area, administrators eliminated special math and science classes designed for learning-disabled students whose first language was not English.

Some of the students could not keep up in regular classes, however, even with tutorial help. The school was forced to bring back separate classes, disrupting the students twice.

Yet at other schools, such as Miller Elementary in the Tierrasanta area, the power to tailor programs to student needs and faculty abilities fostered creativity.

Two years ago, special education teacher Marc Wasserman was teaching a separate class of students with learning and emotional problems, just paces away from their fourth- and fifth-grade peers.

Wasserman persuaded his regular education colleagues to include his students in a rotating program similar to high school, in which all students move from teacher to teacher for different subjects.

Not everyone jumped at the chance.

“I went into this kicking and screaming,” said Renee Vallely, a 17-year veteran teacher. “But you know, I’ve found that they’re just kids. They have maybe this problem, but other kids have another problem.”

Vallely takes pride in her ability to meet the challenge. But she also complains that she received no special education training from the district before the change and little afterward.

The greatest concern among regular education teachers in Los Angeles is that they will be forced into new roles without preparation.

San Diego Unified has offered numerous training programs, but attendance is voluntary and schools are not provided with substitutes for the attending teachers.

Meanwhile, unprepared teachers there were expected to cope with everything from daylong tantrums to seizures, IVs to feeding tubes.

Fed up, the teachers union made mandatory training one of their key points during the recent teachers strike, but lost that demand in the final settlement. Instead, a committee has been formed to recommend better approaches to training.

The Los Angeles court settlement is vague on the issue of training, though the teachers union here is advocating that it be comprehensive.

Fleck, the San Diego administrator, considers inadequate training his district’s greatest mistake.

“If there is anything I would do differently next time, it would be to put resources into intensifying staff development for regular education teachers and administrators,” Fleck said. “I can really sympathize with a teacher who has 35 or 36 kids in the class and is trying to figure out how to deal with them, and then we come and put a special ed kid in there too.”