Why Doesn’t ‘Special Ed’ Feel More Special?

They are seated around a classroom table, representatives of an educational system bent on performing its legal duty.

The teacher, the administrator, the psychologist, the nurse, the learning specialist . . . and one empty seat, earmarked for me.

In front of that chair is a box of Kleenex. This, I realize, is not going to be fun.

I am attending my first “IEP,” the formal session required by law to devise an “individualized educational program” for every child deemed to have a disability that merits special education.

Meetings like these, held in every public school, are the cornerstone of a national special education system that can rescue struggling children from failure . . . or doom them to life on the margins of society.

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It has been labeled an educational crisis in this country: The rising proportion of students who require expensive intervention to help them learn.

In the last decade, the number of students qualifying for special education has risen more than 25% nationally and 35% in California, where more than 640,000 students are on special ed rolls.

In Los Angeles Unified School District, one of every nine students receives some special ed services--ranging from a few hours a week with a speech therapist to full-time nursing care--at a cost of about $811 million annually.

Some have profound mental or physical problems, but most suffer from mild learning disabilities, the kind of visual or auditory processing deficits that can interfere with their ability to compute or to read.

The district has been at the center of controversy recently--under court order to hasten the identification and treatment of children with special needs and under review by local educators who complain that too many black children are being shunted into special ed with the label “emotionally disturbed.”

Newly elected school board member Genethia Hayes plans to study special ed placements in her South-Central Los Angeles district.

“I suspect,” she has said, “it’s not just that African Americans are overrepresented in special ed, but that they never get out.

“You have a child who needs services for a limited period of time; special ed can help that child, can serve that need.

“But you put that youngster in special ed, forget about them and let them languish, and they’ll get worse and worse. Then you have a child who becomes angry, anti-social . . . who’ll remain forever outside the mainstream.”

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The referrals come from parents, who worry when their bright children bring home poor grades or fail to comprehend simple homework assignments.

Or from social workers, whose charges veer from anger to depression, because absent parents or abusive homes can breed their own kind of special needs.

Or from teachers, frustrated by behavioral or learning problems . . . the child who always daydreams or can’t stay in his seat, the one who reverses numbers in every math problem, or is in fifth grade and still can’t read.

When I grew up, we all knew kids like these. “Slow,” we called them; we didn’t know about learning disabilities.

Then, they got held back or dropped out. Now they get tested, interviewed, assessed, intervened . . . and if they’re lucky, somebody finds out why Johnny can’t read.

Still, I wonder if “special ed” is a kind label. While some parents say it saved their children, others say it ostracizes, saddles kids with a stigma they never outgrow.

It is, I know now, its own kind of cross to bear . . . a designation that can offer life-changing therapy but acknowledges to the world your child’s deficiencies.

Some parents get angry, others cry at their child’s IEP. It is hard, the special ed teacher says, to listen stoically while “experts” list all that is wrong with your child . . . her visual motor integration problems, her deficit in auditory processing acuity.

There were no tears on my day at the table.

Give me a name, a diagnosis, a treatment. . . . Because while it may be hard to embrace your child’s shortcomings, it is much harder to remain helpless while she struggles or fails.

Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.