Special Ed Joins the Mainstream

Moji Duenas cannot read and may never learn to. Nor can the 18-year-old walk or speak or feed herself. She is incontinent. Convulsions sometimes rattle her body.

Yet Moji is a high school student in the San Francisco Unified School District, taking most of her classes with teens en route to university. She is part of San Francisco’s ambitious -- and sometimes painful -- effort to integrate most disabled students into regular classrooms.

San Francisco began its program eight years ago, making it one of the first urban school systems in the nation to do so. The results have profoundly affected the district, and offer insights for the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is wrestling with a federal consent decree requiring a similar transformation.

Many parents and school officials say San Francisco’s changes, which now are implemented in half the public schools there, give disabled children a chance to thrive. They have fewer limits placed on them and have nondisabled children as behavior models. Even some parents of regular students say their children are learning valuable lessons in compassion and tolerance.

At the same time, the transition has not been smooth. Some teachers and administrators resent having to work with disabled students. Special education teachers are scarce. A number of handicapped youngsters find it difficult to fit into regular classes -- sometimes they are neglected by teachers, or picked on by schoolmates. And a growing segment of educators says the effort, known as “inclusion,” is proving to be more expensive than having separate classrooms for the handicapped.

San Francisco Unified, with its 7,100 special education students, is much smaller than Los Angeles Unified, which has about 81,800, more than half of whom already are mainstreamed for at least part of the day. Los Angeles is under court order to integrate those youngsters further and start desegregation of another 30,000 over the next four years. Los Angeles is seeking to reduce the consent decree’s scope, and recently won a concession keeping 4,800 youngsters in separate, special schools.

Both districts have money troubles and a large number of students who are from poor families or are not fluent in English, or both. Both districts have a daunting array of handicapped children, including those with autism, emotional problems, learning disabilities, cerbral palsy, paralysis, blindess and deafness.

“We all -- whether we are general ed teachers or special ed -- share responsibility for educating all the children,” said Deborah McKnight, San Francisco’s special education director.

Even Moji, who was born with multiple severe disabilities, including brain damage. Her case is testing the limits of inclusion.

Her teachers at George Washington High School, a 1920s-era campus with views of the Golden Gate Bridge, said she has little hope of ever being communicative, much less independent. Still, her mother, Juno Duenas, insisted that Moji (whose given name is Marjorie) spend most of her time in regular classes with a full-time special aide -- and also be given speech and physical therapy.

Because of stress and a $12-an-hour wage, turnover for special education aides is high. In a recent three-week period, Moji had three different aides. The school reported one of them to the police after students witnessed her beating Moji on the head.

But Duenas said her daughter had similar problems when she was in separate special education classes. Mainstreaming, Duenas said, is more likely to improve Moji’s communication and social skills.

“As severely disabled as she is, Moji is in the first wave of students being included. I know the risks involved,” she said. “But my daughter will not be the last one ... so the district and the schools need to learn how to educate them.”

Whatever the benefits for Moji, her presence clearly increased the workload for her Washington High teachers.

Moji’s favorite class, Duenas said, was drama. Teacher John Propster said he sometimes worked Moji into scenes by asking her schoolmates to wheel her around the stage and recite lines for her.

During a recent class on Shakespeare, he had his hands full with several disruptive teens -- most of whom did not have disabilities. “If anyone else talks I’m going to take points off!” he yelled. Moji sat silently at the back of the stage for the entire period.

Washington Principal Andrew W. Ishibashi respects the district’s policy regarding parents’ wishes on inclusion where possible. But he doesn’t think it’s realistic in the case of severely disabled students like Moji.

“She’s mentally untrainable,” he said.

Unhappy with that assessment, Duenas recently moved Moji to another public high school in San Francisco, Wallenberg Traditional High. She said her daughter’s situation has improved.

The special education teacher there holds monthly strategy meetings with Duenas and Moji’s other teachers. When other children in art class are drawing faces, an assistant will help Moji draw a circle and then help her place paper eyes, noses and lips.

A more typical student is Tyronne Keith, 16, who has cerebral palsy. A devoted wrestling fan, Tyronne often wears a T-shirt with a picture of his favorite rumbler, Goldberg, and is greeted warmly throughout the school. Despite a speech impediment, Tyronne has a quick wit. When his special education aide was late one day, Tyronne jokingly told him: “I’m firing you.”

Tyronne was in segregated programs in lower grades and still spends most of his day in a special class because his mother, Beatrice Keith, said he receives more attention there. He is mainstreamed for some other classes, such as gym and drama.

“With so many kids in the classroom, the [general education] teacher can’t take time out for two or three handicapped kids,” Keith said.

However, Joyce Chisholm, the now retired founder of San Francisco Unified’s inclusion program, predicts that more parents will place their children in regular classrooms as much as possible. She calls inclusion an “educational belief system.”

San Francisco reformed its special education programs, in part, to reduce the number of African American children who were unnecessarily labeled as disabled. The hope was that mainstreaming would build their academic and social skills.

Chisholm tried to woo parents and educators with an aggressive information campaign.

The faculty at Alamo Elementary School, nationally recognized for academic excellence, was among the most resistant. Located in the Richmond Unified School District, Alamo was designated an inclusion campus a decade ago. But it took eight years and the ouster of a principal to get the school to begin integration in earnest.

Gina Ferrante, who became principal two years ago, said some parents and teachers described the placement of disabled children in regular classes as a “dump and hope” program. But the more training Ferrante offered, she said, the less trepidation teachers felt. “People were resistant to special education because of fear of the unknown,” she said.

Part of Chisholm’s plan included hiring innovative staff from as far afield as Florida. Special education teachers are scarce. Of the 26,454 positions in California, a third are either open or are filled by teachers without full credentials. In San Francisco, as many as 60% of special education teachers lack full credentials, according to the district.

Retaining those teachers is tough too. The jobs are demanding and pay no more than teaching children without handicaps.

Floating between classes, the best inclusion specialists are teaching virtuosos who can supervise classroom assistants, collaborate with regular teachers and tailor general education subjects to several disabled students -- all on the fly.

Said Kent Mitchell, head of San Francisco’s teachers union: “The difficulty of their task is inventing the airplane while they are in the air.”

Kristen Lombardo cuts a nimble figure at Hoover Middle School, striding up stairs and down hallways to spend time with a dozen disabled children in nearly as many classes. It’s hard to juggle so many kids, Lombardo said, but dealing diplomatically with territorial teachers can be even harder.

One recent morning at the Sunset District campus, Lombardo walked into an eighth-grade math class in which an autistic student and another student with a learning disability were mixed in with nondisabled children. She found them struggling with math exercises, and a chair was left empty next to each of them, evidently meant for Lombardo. She was furious; to Lombardo it sent the message “that special education children are my problem.”

Mike Lee, the no-nonsense teacher of the math class, gave Lombardo a gruff greeting.

“How long will you be here?” he demanded. Lee was teaching fractions, a hard subject that required his students to concentrate.

Lombardo bristled: “A few minutes -- you want my watch?”

Lee supports inclusion in theory, he explained later, but he finds it obtrusive in practice.

“My classroom is like a ship, and I’m the captain,” he said. “I’ve got to time my class down to the second, and you’re never sure when the inclusion teacher is coming in. Sometimes I might be giving a test, and the [special education] student is yelling and screaming.”

Collaboration between teachers fell by the wayside that day -- Lombardo spent all of her time explaining the lesson to the two special education students while Lee worked with the rest of the class.

The inclusion model is an outgrowth of the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which mandates that disabled children receive “free, appropriate public education.” The same law led most school districts in the 1980s to create “special day classes” for handicapped students. Increasingly, it is being interpreted to mean that separate classes should be the last resort, and inclusion the first.

Patty Wong pulled her 7-year-old autistic son, Aaron, out of a segregated special education class because “his behavior was going negative,” she said. Now he is in a regular second-grade class at West Portal Elementary School in southwest San Francisco and doing better.

“Most autistic kids are visual learners, and they will do what they see,” Wong said. “I want him to see good models all the time.”

Like many autistic children, Aaron can be more physical than verbal. So, special education teacher Tiffany Kendall recently read to Aaron’s class a book called “Tobin Learns to Make Friends,” which is about a train that shoves his way past other characters. Kendall linked the story to Aaron, saying he “is a little different, but what helps Aaron so much is that he has really good friends in this classroom.”

A boy named Jonathan raised his hand and said he politely reminds Aaron about school rules when the autistic boy pushes or cuts in lines. Kendall applauded Jonathan and advised him: “And when Aaron does not shove you, you can tell him, ‘Thank you Aaron for not pushing me.’ ”

But Terri Bookwalter, an English teacher at Lowell High School on San Francisco’s west side, said the district places too much emphasis on inclusion.

“I think it’s very stressful for special ed students,” she said. “The normal day can be highly distracting” for children with special needs.

Bookwalter speaks as a general education teacher who has taught disabled students in regular classes -- and as a parent of a son with Charge syndrome, a combination of birth defects that often includes heart problems, hearing loss and stunted growth.

“I had to threaten to take the district to court” to get her son out of regular classes and into a separate special education class, Bookwalter said. “And I’m a teacher.”

There her son stayed until he graduated and went off to college.

Special education costs now account for about 13% of San Francisco Unified’s budget and about 10% of Los Angeles’. Of that, the federal government provides less than one dollar in 10. Many special education experts think the federal share should be four times as high.

Neither Los Angeles nor San Francisco Unified has done a cost analysis for inclusion versus segregation.

“On a gut level, we know the cost of special education has gone up with inclusion,” said Victor Milhoan, a San Francisco Unified budget official.

A study this year by Arun Ramanathan, a Harvard University researcher, said San Francisco relies too heavily on paraprofessionals, aides who push children’s wheelchairs, tutor them and help them in bathrooms. He said that the district should spread those aides among several children at once -- especially when the youngsters have relatively mild disabilities.

Ramanathan estimated that the district has increased spending on special aides from $200,000 a year in 1994, the year integration began, to about $5 million a year. That is equal to about 5% of the district’s total $88-million special education budget.

Los Angeles Unified would have to spend perhaps $50 million a year to reach San Francisco’s staffing level. L.A. Unified officials say that is impossible.

Other extra expenses for inclusion include more special computers and other technology to help disabled children follow along in classes, and to make campuses more accessible.

Disabled students who say San Francisco’s schools are not accessible enough have filed a class-action lawsuit against the district. Broken sidewalks and “alpine gradient” wheelchair ramps have left some children with bruises and broken bones, said Guy Wallace, the lead attorney in the case. Elevators frequently break down and many toilet stalls are too small for wheelchairs, he said.

Logan Hopper, an architectural consultant for the district, said it is “too expensive to do accessibility for accessibility’s sake.”

He wants comprehensive building projects instead of piecemeal upgrades for special education. That way, Hopper said, “the schools will be better for all children, not just special education students.”