The Challenge of Special Education

By SOLOMON MOORE and ERIKA HAYASAKI

Feb. 1, 2002 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

Gloria Vasquez wakes and dresses her 10-year-old daughter Yvonne each morning, starting with a fresh diaper. She spoon-feeds breakfast to the girl, then takes her to the Salvin School for disabled children in South Los Angeles, where Yvonne is being trained in basic life skills. She never learned to read.

Milo Howell is an example of a different type of special education student in the Los Angeles Unified School District. At age 8, he started classes at a school for the blind. The Granada Hills youngster at first couldn’t read Braille but gradually made such progress that he transferred to mainstream campuses. He now attends Glendale Community College and hopes to become a sportscaster or a psychologist.

When children are labeled as disabled in the Los Angeles school district, it can mean many things--that they have autism, mental retardation, deafness, the inability to walk, a learning disability or an anger-management problem.

As a result, disabled children have a wide range of educational needs. And meeting those, experts say, will be one of the major challenges as the Los Angeles school district embarks on a massive reform of its special education program aimed at integrating as many disabled youngsters as possible into regular schools.

Some disabled children, such as Yvonne, probably will always need an aide or even separate classes. Others might need to be pulled out of regular classes for speech therapy or coordination exercises or counseling. Still others, such as Howell, might thrive in a regular classroom with non-disabled youngsters.

Even children with the same disability often have very different needs.

“You can’t say that all autistic children should be educated in a general education classroom, a separate classroom or a segregated special school,” said Paul Mueller, administrative coordinator for the Los Angeles Unified School District’s special education programs. “It depends on the severity of their disability and the parents’ desires.”

An estimated 45,000 special education students in Los Angeles already spend at least part of their school day in mainstream classes.

Under a recent plan, the result of a federal lawsuit and investigations, as many as 35,000 other disabled students who are now attending separate special education schools or segregated all-day classes could be at least partly integrated into regular schools.

By 2006, the plan requires that disabled students make up 7% to 17% of nearly every Los Angeles district school, including 16 campuses now devoted wholly to special education.

Many Children

Were Misdiagnosed

The federal investigations found that the district misdiagnosed many children and often failed to provide adequate resources to educate them. The probe also revealed that a disproportionate number of disabled students were isolated from their peers, despite evidence that disabled children often progress better in regular educational settings.

But deciding which children are able to handle a regular classroom and which should be in special programs has always been a difficult call, officials say.

Doing that on a large scale in the more than 660 Los Angeles district campuses over the next four years won’t be easy.

Disabled children fall into 21 major categories in the district. Those with learning disabilities, such as attention-deficit disorder, are the largest group by far, about 60% of all special education students.

Those with speech problems and mental retardation make up the next largest categories.

Other groups include autistic, deaf and emotionally disturbed students, as well as those with “established medical disabilities”--which could include anything from frequent seizures to cerebral palsy.

Federal law requires school districts to be extremely flexible, often at great expense.

Under the plan stemming from the lawsuit settlement, disabled students are supposed to be reevaluated yearly. Others will have their education programs changed according to their progress. Still others will join regular classes.

“What we tried to do is provide a continuum of options,” Mueller said. “On that continuum, you might have a child in a general ed class with some help from an aide. Or no services at all. Or it could go all the way to private residential facilities where they spend 24 hours a day.”

But Mueller conceded that the system broke down in Los Angeles, where backlogs prevented many children from being reevaluated, and a lack of resources and adequately trained teachers left many families with no choice but to send their children to segregated special education schools.

Special education accounts for $1billion annually, or 20% of L.A. Unified’s budget. Officials have not estimated the additional costs of the integration plan.

“There’s always a problem with resources,” Mueller said. “We had trouble being compliant [with federal law] let alone innovating new programs.”

Many parents of disabled students support the integration plan. But even a success story like Howell’s has a mixed history, according to his mother, Patty. When her son moved on to mainstream schools, he did not have enough support there and she had to pay for tutors.

Given the crowding in some public school classrooms, she wonders how the shift to more integration will affect disabled children: “What teacher is going to [be able to] give you one on one?”

Mother Frets

About Services

Vasquez says her daughter is dependent on adults for nearly everything and she hopes that the district changes do not mean fewer services for children like Yvonne.

Vasquez worries that mainstream schools will not have three nurses, as the Salvin campus does, to take care of Yvonne when she has seizures. Will there be enough aides to make sure Yvonne takes her medicine and has her diaper changed?

“I prefer it the way it is. They have attention here,” Vasquez said.

Debbie Clark placed her 8-year-old autistic son, Daniel, in regular classes in third grade at Granada Elementary School in Granada Hills because she didn’t want him to feel different.

It hasn’t worked out, she says. Some other students are bullying him.

Clark says the school should have done more to protect her son. She is considering transferring Daniel to a private school.

Some children “tell him he is different, weird, and he doesn’t know how to handle it,” Clark said.

“He has no friends at school. He is devastated about that.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX/INFOGRAPHIC)

Special education students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, by category:

Specific Learning Disability 49,590

Language/Speech Impaired 5,067

Mentally Retarded 3,867

Emotionally Impaired 3,339

Autistic 3,210

Other Health Impaired 1,316