A Model for Mainstreaming

On a recent morning, two teams with a mixture of disabled and nondisabled students played on an asphalt yard at Alfonso B. Perez School in East Los Angeles.

A teacher’s aide guided Chris, a mentally retarded 10-year-old, to third base. A child with Down syndrome kicked the ball. Meanwhile, two boys without disabilities, Ted, 8, and Joshua, 9, were among those in the infield.

Joshua said he notices but is not bothered by differences between him and disabled students. “Sometimes I can tell by their faces,” he said. Chris interrupted and mumbled something unintelligible. “Like him,” Joshua said with a matter-of-fact shrug. “See how he talks?”

Chris then became confused and ran to home base, waving his arms and shrieking. “No, Chris, it’s not your turn!” yelled a teacher’s aide. Ted pointed at Chris and laughed.

Such interactions are daily fare at Perez. In a rare arrangement, the special education campus in the Los Angeles Unified School District also enrolls nondisabled youngsters beyond kindergarten. As the district embarks on a plan to integrate 35,000 special education students into all regular campuses over the next four years, Perez may provide a glimpse of the risks and rewards ahead.

The experience at Perez suggests that, even on a small scale, such integration can be challenging.

The campus enrolls 400 severely disabled students through high school and 100 nondisabled only through third grade. Younger students with and without disabilities play on the jungle gym, make bracelets, sing, eat and draw together. In kindergarten and first grade, they work on basic lessons and are not too concerned with popularity.

But as students get older, they are more aware of differences and mixing becomes harder. Plus, Perez offers what families see as benefits of segregation to students with such disabilities as autism, mental retardation and cerebral palsy. In middle and high school years, it is a sheltered environment where they can shine--even be elected prom queen or become a basketball star.

On the other hand, many Perez teachers and parents say the school’s lessons in tolerance and inclusion can help overcome obstacles of wider integration.

“There’s a tremendous amount of fear that we won’t be able to accomplish this [districtwide integration] and I think what Perez has done is provided us with an example that it can be done when you get creative and use community resources to make it work,” said Mary Falvey, an education professor at Cal State Los Angeles who co-wrote the district’s integration plan.

Integration at Perez began six years ago with the preschool. As nondisabled students got older, their parents wanted them to stay in the intimate setting with its attentive staff, which includes 49 teachers and 95 classroom aides. The nondisabled program expanded through third grade, and administrators are expecting to add fourth and fifth grades.

Starting in first grade, however, the staff has not figured out how to integrate disabled children into regular classes other than art and music. The children are mixed mainly during lunch, recess and social activities.

“It’s always a struggle,” said Principal Beverly Feinstein. “We want to develop further. We want to have more participation with our special ed students and general ed students during the day.”

Still, teachers say the difficulties of integration at Perez will multiply when integration expands districtwide. Most challenging, they say, is meeting the needs of so many different types of students, including some who may never be in a mainstream classroom.

One may be Michael, an autistic teenager at Perez who stands more than 6 feet tall, weighs more than 200 pounds and has the mind of a 3-year-old. He has a habit of stripping off his clothes in public. Michael (his last name and those of some other children in this article are being withheld at the request of the school and families) sometimes throws tantrums and has the potential to unintentionally injure people around him.

“When they try to put students who we know cannot comprehend the curriculum [in our classes], that’s where we have our hands tied,” said Adriana Perez, a kindergarten teacher in the regular program at Perez. “We’re willing to teach any child--if the child can learn.”

On a recent morning in her classroom, an uppercase and lowercase example of the letter P was neatly written on the chalkboard. Six-year-old Leticia Serrano was one of 20 general students spelling words such as piano, pan and pail. Children in this class perform one grade level ahead of most of their peers, the teacher said.

Across campus, special education teacher Scott Matz led a group of the most severely disabled students ages 4 to 9. A teacher’s aide tube-fed milk formula to one student. Matz helped another hold a spoon to eat mashed hamburger and potatoes. The class sticks to a painstaking schedule that stresses toileting, physical exercises and feeding, with a little time for Matz to read them storybooks and talk about history.

Students in Perez’s regular class are learning how to write sentences.

Students in Matz’s special class are learning how to hold a pencil.

“We’re not miracle workers here,” Matz said. “As a utopian ideal [integration] is wonderful but ... we’re teaching them life skills, like how to feed themselves and how to walk.”

The school is unusual because, other than a school for the deaf, it is the district’s only special education campus that mixes in nondisabled students after kindergarten, according to Nancy Franklin, a special education coordinator for the district.

Francisco Ortega has three daughters who attend Perez’s regular program. Two are not disabled. One has a physical disability that requires her to sometimes use crutches or a wheelchair, but she functions fine in a regular classroom.

Ortega said he liked the teachers and wanted his children to learn that “everyone is equal.”

An estimated 45,000 special education students are already integrated at least part time at many regular Los Angeles schools. But about 35,000 others attend separate special education schools or segregated all-day classes. And that group would be at least partly integrated at all of the Los Angeles district’s 660 regular schools by 2006, under the new plan resulting from a class action lawsuit on behalf of the disabled.

Sherwood Best, a Cal State L.A. associate professor in special education, praises Perez as one model for integration. “Rather than the child with special education needs being educated in a regular campus, we’re bringing children with general education needs on a special ed campus,” she said.

But she does not think full inclusion will always work for all students if schools focus mainly on the education of nondisabled students.

Although many advocates for the disabled welcome integration, some also say they fear resulting changes as the district’s 16 special education centers, including Perez, admit more nondisabled students.

Michael Rodriguez, 20, is among the 200 disabled students in Perez’s middle and high school grades. He is mentally retarded and reads at second-grade level. Sometimes he has emotional fits. Rodriguez was in regular schools until sixth grade, and he hated it.

“They used to beat me up sometimes,” he said. “They would steal my lunch tickets and breakfast tickets too. They chased me around to get it.”

His mother, Rosalinda, said Perez was her last chance.

“I came to the school and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I don’t want my son here [with so many severely disabled students].’ ... But everything else had failed, so I said, ‘Let’s give this a try.’”

At Perez, her son is happy.

He carries a picture of his girlfriend, who also is mentally retarded, in his wallet. He once sang his favorite Beatles song, “Yesterday,” in the school’s talent show.

He works part time doing office work at the school, and he wants to eventually earn a steady income and get his own apartment.

Last year, Rodriguez attended the annual prom, where students dress up in gowns and tuxedos, some rent limos and a king and queen are elected--the kind of social experience at Perez that staff members fear their students will lose when the school is converted into a primary center or elementary school.

There is a basketball team made up mostly of mentally retarded boys, and a squad of varsity cheerleaders. The other day, cheerleader coach Diana Tucker led the girls, most of whom are mentally retarded, in a routine to a rendition of “Turn the Beat Around.” Wearing yellow T-shirts, the girls spun and shimmied, waving yellow, blue and white pompoms.

Tucker said her girls would never have the opportunity to cheer on varsity squads in general schools.

“Do you think regular kids make cheerleading teams?” she asked. “I mean, if you have a pimple, you don’t make the team.”

Falvey, however, said students with disabilities have become school dance kings, leaders and even cheerleaders at regular schools across the country.

“For so many of us who grew up in schools that didn’t have kids with disabilities, our first reaction is usually fear,” Falvey said. “If students grow up around each other, there will be less teasing and stereotyping.”

Perez’s physical plant also has its advantages.

Every hallway is spacious, every door is wide enough for a wheelchair, next to every stairway is a ramp. Some classrooms have large bathrooms with open doors. There are three full-time nurses.

Some teachers at Perez fear that wider integration will be disastrous if the district does not devote enough resources to extra training for teachers and renovating buildings.

Others say the rewards at Perez are well worth the effort.

In Blanca Garcia’s integrated preschool class recently, two teachers--one general and one special--and four assistants watched and directed the children as they made bracelets.

Four-year-old Andrea created a friendship bracelet of blue, red, pink and black beads. Three-year-old Lucero reached for a bead with her left hand and held onto her walker with the other. Lucero, who is developmentally delayed, knocked over the tray, spilling the beads onto the table. Then she reached for Andrea’s bracelet. “No,” Andrea said, pulling the bracelet away.

Lucero stumbled to another table, where students were separating candy hearts by color. She and a nondisabled student got into a tugging match over a tray of hearts. “That’s not nice,” a teacher’s aide told them

But when Garcia later asked the class to whom they would give their friendship bracelets, Andrea raised her hand and shouted: “I want to give my bracelet to Lucero!”