The U.S. Supreme Court took a major step toward ending a 17-year legal battle today, deciding Arizona has done enough to help students who haven’t learned to speak, read or write English.
The justices reversed the decision of the lower courts and sent the case, known as Flores vs. Arizona, back with instructions to consider improvements the state has made in the way schools teach English learners.
“This is a major step to stop federal trial judges from micromanaging state education systems,” said state schools superintendent Tom Horne, who asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on the case. “This affirms that important value that we the people control our government and our elected representatives and not ruled over by an aristocracy of lifetime federal judges.”
The Supreme Court decided the lower courts concentrated too narrowly on how much the state spent to help language learners and allowed that increases in overall school funding could be considered as a boost to help schools take the appropriate action called for in federal law.
The decision did not weaken Equal Education Opportunity Act of 1974, as some civil rights attorneys feared. But the justices’ said simply complying with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 did help to satisfy the requirements in the 1974 law to “take appropriate action” to help students overcome language barriers.
Category Archives: Special Education
Court Favors Parents in Battle Over Special-Education Private School Tuition
Robert Barnes & Nelson Hernandez:
By a 6 to 3 vote, the court settled an emotional and contentious issue that has divided frustrated parents and financially strapped school officials, often ending in legal battles. In writing the opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens said Congress intended for the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act to provide an appropriate educational experience for all children, no matter whether they had ever received special-education services from a school system.
The issue has emerged as one of the fastest-growing components of local education budgets, threatening to “seriously deplete public education funds,” according to a brief filed by the nation’s urban school districts.
Local school systems in the Washington area spend millions of dollars each year on private school reimbursement. And the D.C. public schools allocated $7.5 million of this year’s $783 million budget just for the legal costs of hearing officers or judges to decide whether the system can provide appropriate services for children with disabilities.
Justices Rule For Parents Of Special Ed Student
The Supreme Court on Monday made it easier for parents of special education students to get reimbursement for private school tuition. School administrators fear the 6-3 ruling will lead to a jump in private school placements.
The student in the case is known simply as “T.A.” The Forest Grove School District, outside of Portland, Ore., noticed that he was having problems in high school, but suspected marijuana use and refused to give him special education services. Toward the end of his junior year, T.A.’s parents pulled him out of public school and sent him to a private residential academy.
The parents then sued the school district to recover the $65,000 they spent on private tuition. The school district argued the parents stepped over the line and lost the ability to seek reimbursement when they transferred him without first giving public special education a try.
Judge orders search for Milwaukee students in need of special education
A federal judge has ordered Milwaukee Public Schools to launch a wide search for students who didn’t get special education services they should have gotten between 2000 and 2005 and to figure out what needs to be done to make that up to them.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Aaron Goodstein ordered that someone from outside the system be hired to monitor work on providing education services to compensate the students or former students involved because MPS has not shown it will adequately remedy its problems in special education on its own.
Goodstein’s decision earlier this month was another step in a lawsuit that dates to 2001. In earlier decisions, he ruled that MPS had denied students their rights in the past and ordered major changes in how MPS deals with deciding whether children are entitled to special education help. The process of making those changes is under way.
Study Shows Possible Link Between Deaths and ADHD Drugs
Children taking stimulant drugs such as Ritalin to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder are several times as likely to suffer sudden, unexplained death as children who are not taking such drugs, according to a study published yesterday that was funded by the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute of Mental Health.
While the numbers involved in the study were very small and researchers stopped short of suggesting a cause and effect, the study is the first to rigorously demonstrate a rare but worrisome connection between ADHD drugs and sudden death among children. In doing so, the research adds to the evolving puzzle parents and doctors face in deciding whether to treat children with medication.
Doctors have speculated about such a connection in the past because stimulants increase heart rate and have other cardiovascular effects. Physicians are currently advised to evaluate patients for cardiac risks before prescribing the drugs, and FDA officials said yesterday that those guidelines do not need strengthening in light of the new study. About 2.5 million children in the United States take ADHD medications such as Ritalin and Adderall.
Teen sacrifices fun for hard work, education
While her classmates were signing yearbooks and preening for the prom, Vicheka Chres was experiencing a different kind of senioritis as she approached Friday’s graduation.
As she had since she started high school, Vicheka, 17, was studying six hours a night. After school and on weekends, she was making apple turnovers in her uncle’s bakery – for no pay. At home, she was translating for her mother, whose English is poor and who has a sixth-grade education.
“Fun? I don’t really have fun,” Vicheka said recently while taking a break from swabbing tables at Rio Vista Bakery, where her mother also works. “I know American kids go see movies, concerts. Go shopping. But that’s not what I do.”
Vicheka has reason to be motivated. She knows that if her family had stayed in their native Cambodia, which they left in 2003, she wouldn’t have had the luxury of studying trigonometry and literature six hours a night. She’d be working in a factory, sewing clothes 12 hours a day for $50 a month.
Instead, she’s bound for UC Davis. She plans to study biochemistry so she can eventually be a pharmacist and support her family, those in Rio Vista as well as in Phnom Penh.
Research suggests children can recover from autism
Leo Lytel was diagnosed with autism as a toddler. But by age 9 he had overcome the disorder.
His progress is part of a growing body of research that suggests at least 10 percent of children with autism can “recover” from it — most of them after undergoing years of intensive behavioral therapy.
Skeptics question the phenomenon, but University of Connecticut psychology professor Deborah Fein is among those convinced it’s real.
She presented research this week at an autism conference in Chicago that included 20 children who, according to rigorous analysis, got a correct diagnosis but years later were no longer considered autistic.
Among them was Leo, a boy in Washington, D.C., who once made no eye contact, who echoed words said to him and often spun around in circles — all classic autism symptoms. Now he is an articulate, social third-grader. His mother, Jayne Lytel, says his teachers call Leo a leader.
The study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, involves children ages 9 to 18.
Autism researcher Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer of the advocacy group Autism Speaks, called Fein’s research a breakthrough.
A Day With Autism
We spend some time with a family whose little boy is newly diagnosed.
iPhone applications can help the autistic
Leslie Clark and her husband have been trying to communicate with their autistic 7-year-old son, JW, for years, but until last month, the closest they got was rudimentary sign language.
He’s “a little bit of a mini-genius,” Clark says, but like many autistic children, JW doesn’t speak at all.
Desperate to communicate with him, she considered buying a specialized device like the ones at his elementary school in Lincoln, Neb. But the text-to-speech machines are huge, heavy and expensive; a few go for $8,000 to $10,000.
Then a teacher told her about a new application that a researcher had developed for, of all things, the iPhone and iPod Touch. Clark drove to the local Best Buy and picked up a Touch, then downloaded the “app” from iTunes.
Total cost: about $500.
At-Risk Need a Mix of Good Teachers, Social Service Help
Karen Kaldenbach, an 18-year-old high school senior in Arlington County, remembers vividly what life was like when she was 11: “I saw Social Services almost as much as I saw my mother, who was always drunk. Her best friends, alcohol and money, were always there for her. She spent so much time with them, she couldn’t raise my little sister and me. Social Services always came to talk to me at school. They asked questions about my family. My response? A lie, always.”
Such stories are not uncommon in the Washington area. They often end unhappily. Yet these days, Kaldenbach is thriving, with a supportive adoptive mother, plus awards, scholarships and an acceptance letter from George Mason University.
We are in the midst of a national debate, its outcome uncertain, over what should be the emphasis of efforts to fix public schools. Some say the focus should be on improving teaching. Only in the classroom, they say, is there a chance to give students — particularly those in poverty — the tools they need to succeed. Others say teachers cannot reach those children until their family lives, shaken by parental joblessness or mental or physical illness, are straightened out by government action.
Restraint can dispirit and hurt special-ed students
Toni Price was at work that afternoon in 2002 when she got the call from her foster son Cedric’s eighth-grade teacher: Paramedics were at his middle school in Killeen, Texas. Cedric wasn’t breathing.
When Price arrived at school, there he was, lying on the floor. “I’m thinking he’s just laying there because he didn’t want to get in trouble,” she says, fighting back tears.
Actually, Cedric was dead.
A 14-year-old special-education student who’d arrived at the school with a history of abuse and neglect, Cedric had been taken from his home five years earlier with his siblings.
He’d just been smothered by his teacher, police said, after she placed him in a “therapeutic floor hold” to keep him from struggling during a disagreement over lunch.
Failure Gets a Pass: Firing tenured teachers can be a costly and tortuous task
A Times investigation finds the process so arduous that many principals don’t even try, except in the very worst cases. Jettisoning a teacher solely because he or she can’t teach is rare.
The eighth-grade boy held out his wrists for teacher Carlos Polanco to see.
He had just explained to Polanco and his history classmates at Virgil Middle School in Koreatown why he had been absent: He had been in the hospital after an attempt at suicide.
Polanco looked at the cuts and said they “were weak,” according to witness accounts in documents filed with the state. “Carve deeper next time,” he was said to have told the boy.
“Look,” Polanco allegedly said, “you can’t even kill yourself.”
The boy’s classmates joined in, with one advising how to cut a main artery, according to the witnesses.
Autism and extraordinary ability
THAT genius is unusual goes without saying. But is it so unusual that it requires the brains of those that possess it to be unusual in others ways, too? A link between artistic genius on the one hand and schizophrenia and manic-depression on the other, is widely debated. However another link, between savant syndrome and autism, is well established. It is, for example, the subject of films such as “Rain Man”, illustrated above.
A study published this week by Patricia Howlin of King’s College, London, reinforces this point. It suggests that as many as 30% of autistic people have some sort of savant-like capability in areas such as calculation or music. Moreover, it is widely acknowledged that some of the symptoms associated with autism, including poor communication skills and an obsession with detail, are also exhibited by many creative types, particularly in the fields of science, engineering, music, drawing and painting. Indeed, there is now a cottage industry in re-interpreting the lives of geniuses in the context of suggestions that they might belong, or have belonged, on the “autistic spectrum”, as the range of syndromes that include autistic symptoms is now dubbed.
A Gallop Toward Hope: One Family’s Adventure in Fighting Autism
When Rupert Isaacson decided to take his autistic son, Rowan, on a trip to Mongolia to ride horses and seek the help of shamans two years ago, he had a gut instinct that the adventure would have a healing effect on the boy. Mr. Isaacson’s instinct was rewarded after the trip, when some of Rowan’s worst behavioral issues, including wild temper tantrums, all but disappeared.
Now the publisher of Mr. Isaacson’s book about the journey, “The Horse Boy,” has a similar instinct about the market potential of his story, and is hoping for its own happy ending.
Little, Brown & Company, which released “The Horse Boy” on Tuesday, has a lot riding on its success: the publisher paid more than $1 million in an advance to Mr. Isaacson before he and his family had even taken their Mongolian trip.
Michael Pietsch, publisher of Little, Brown, said booksellers had already placed orders high enough to justify a first printing of 150,000 copies.
“Hand in Hand: Academic & Social Success”
Wisconsin Center for Education Research, via a kind reader’s email:
Recent developments in social and emotional learning (SEL) have pointed to the reciprocal relations between children’s academic functioning and their socio-emotional health. Professional literature in this field points to the need for including students’ academic skills and competencies as part of mental health intervention research.
University of Wisconsin-Madison psychologist and professor Thomas R. Kratochwill says educators cannot afford to continue offering mental health services for K-12 students in isolation. These services need to be reframed, mainstreamed, and folded into schools’ broader academic mission.
The good news is that schools already have resources, supports, and opportunities that may provide entry points for delivery of expanded mental health services. Virtually all elementary and secondary schools in the U.S. have school psychologists and provide mental health services, Kratochwill says. The bad news is that the proportion of students needing services continues to outpace supply, and mental health services often remain separate from academic programs. Knowledge about mental health programs and educational achievement have developed in isolation from each other.
To identify research directions for future studies of school-based mental health services, Tom Kratochwill and colleagues reviewed scholarly literature to identify evidence- based interventions that target a combination of students’ academic-educational functioning and their mental health functioning.
They studied 2000 articles published between 1990 and 2006; only 64 studies met the methodological criteria for inclusion in this review. Of those 64 studies, 24 tested the effects of a program on both academic and mental health outcomes, while 40 examined mental health outcomes only.
Schools are increasingly held accountable for achieving academic outcomes. Given that, Kratochwill says he was surprised that most of the mental health studies did not include academically relevant outcomes. That means that the impact of school-based mental health interventions on educationally relevant behaviors is under researched and may be poorly understood.
Many children receive mental health services in school settings. Although studies of social and emotional learning have linked social and academic competence, the impacts of mental health interventions on academics, and of academic interventions on mental health, are understudied.
Kratochwill argues for a multi-tiered intervention approach in schools. Varying levels of service intensity are available over time and in different grades for students, especially during transitional periods.
Because schools and districts have tight budgets, it’s important to know which students might benefit most from different types of intervention. And to streamline or adapt effective interventions for dissemination on a larger scale, it’s important to understand how various interventions produce positive outcomes.
Treating Autism as if Vaccines Caused ItThe theory may be dead, but the treatments live on.
A federal court may have changed the public discourse about the safety of vaccines in February, when it dismissed the theory that they cause autism. But vaccine damage is still the reigning paradigm for a rump caucus of thousands of parents who turn to physicians with a remarkable set of beliefs and practices in hope of finding recourse for their children’s ills.
To sift through the 15,000-page record of the Autism Omnibus hearings and the decisions by the three special masters who considered the evidence is to peek into a medical universe where autism is considered a disease of environmental toxicity, rather than an inherited disorder, and where doctors expose children to hundreds of tests simply to justify the decision to “detoxify” them. In some cases, the judges found, doctors simply ignored data that didn’t fit the diagnosis.
The court came down hard on the alternative medical practitioners who tailor their treatments to fit theories of vaccine damage. Among the doctors criticized was Jeff Bradstreet, a former Christian preacher in Melbourne, Fla., who has treated 4,000 children with neurological disorders. Among the children was Colten Snyder, whose case was one of those considered by the court.
Connecticut Special-Education Advocates Dislike Plan To Change Complaint Process
Parents and special education advocates fear that a proposal before the legislature could make it harder for special-education students to get “free, appropriate, public education” in the state.
Under a current regulation, parents who are unable to resolve a problem with their child’s special-education plan through the school district can appeal to the state Department of Education. The appeal can lead to a state-mediated hearing at which the school district must demonstrate that the education plan adheres to federal law.
But a bill proposed by the legislature’s education committee would shift that burden of proof to the party filing the complaint — which in most cases is the parents.
Supporters of the bill say it would save school districts money and shorten hearings, which can last anywhere from a week to 40 days.
An Outbreak of Autism, or a Statistical Fluke?
Ayub Abdi is a cute 5-year-old with a smile that might be called shy if not for the empty look in his eyes. He does not speak. When he was 2, he could say “Dad,” “Mom,” “give me” and “need water,” but he has lost all that.
He does scream and spit, and he moans a loud “Unnnnh! Unnnnh!” when he is unhappy. At night he pounds the walls for hours, which led to his family’s eviction from their last apartment.
As he is strapped into his seat in the bus that takes him to special education class, it is hard not to notice that there is only one other child inside, and he too is a son of Somali immigrants.
“I know 10 guys whose kids have autism,” said Ayub’s father, Abdirisak Jama, a 39-year-old security guard. “They are all looking for help.”
Autism is terrifying the community of Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, and some pediatricians and educators have joined parents in raising the alarm. But public health experts say it is hard to tell whether the apparent surge of cases is an actual outbreak, with a cause that can be addressed, or just a statistical fluke.
To Keep Students, Colleges Cut Anything but Aid
With the economy forcing budget cuts and layoffs in higher education, colleges and universities might be expected to be cutting financial aid. But no.
Students considering a wide range of private schools, as well as those who are already enrolled, can expect to get more aid this year, not less.
The increases highlight the hand-to-mouth existence of many of the nation’s smaller and less well-known institutions. With only tiny endowments, they need full enrollment to survive, and they are anxious to prevent top students from going elsewhere.
Falling even a few students short of expectations can mean laying off faculty members, eliminating courses or shelving planned expansions.
“The last thing colleges and universities are going to cut this year is financial aid,” said Kathy Kurz, an enrollment consultant to colleges. “Most of them recognize that their discount rates are going to go up, but they’d rather have a discounted person in the seat than no one in the seat.”
Court Rules Autism Not Caused by Childhood Vaccines
Thousands of parents who claimed that childhood vaccines had caused their children to develop autism are wrong and not entitled to federal compensation, a special court ruled today in three decisions with far-reaching implications for a bitterly fought medical controversy.
The long-awaited decision on three test cases is a severe blow to a grass-roots movement that has argued — predominantly through books, magazines and the Internet — that children’s shots have been responsible for the surge in autism diagnoses in the United States in recent decades. The vast majority of the scientific establishment, backed by federal health agencies, has strenuously argued there is no link between vaccines and autism, and warned that scaring parents away from vaccinating their youngsters places children at risk for a host of serious childhood diseases.
Wisconsin Governor Stumps for Mandatory Autism Insurance Coverage
Gov. Jim Doyle is stumping for a bill that would require insurance companies to cover autism.
Most insurance companies don’t cover autism because it is classified as an emotional disorder rather than a neurological condition.
A host of lawmakers and Drew Goldsmith, a 12-year-old autistic boy from Middleton, backed Doyle at a press conference in his office Tuesday.
Doyle is proposing strengthening current legislation to include minimum coverage levels of $60,000 for intensive treatment and $30,000 for post-intensive services. He said it would cut the waiting list to join a state-run program for autism services by a third.
Lawmakers on Tuesday said they hope to win support for the bill in the Legislature.
Offer vouchers for special education: It would save money and improve quality
About 13% of public school students in New York State are enrolled in special education. Educating each of them costs taxpayers many thousands of dollars more than it does to educate a regular student. With the financial crisis compelling Gov. Paterson, Mayor Bloomberg and other officials around the state to make cuts that have the least impact on services to which we have become accustomed, now is the time for them to give a special-education voucher program a second look. Aside from offering better educational outcomes, such a program would significantly reduce expenditures.
Contrary to popular belief, tuition charged by private schools, where vouchers can be used, is actually lower than public school per-pupil expenditures. Take Florida, which is home to the nation’s first voucher program for disabled students. Under the program, all disabled students are eligible for a voucher that is worth the lesser of the amount the public school would have spent on them or the tuition at a chosen private school. The value of the average voucher for disabled students there is $7,295. Not only is this far less than what the state spends to educate a disabled student in a public school, it is even below the state’s much lower average per-pupil cost of educating all students, both disabled and regular enrollment.
In other words, the public system actually saves money when it pays for students to attend private school, and even more money when those students are disabled.
Special education teachers refocus strategies to passing Wisconsin tests
Main point. Topic sentences. Supporting paragraphs. Organization.
Arrowhead High School teacher Kathy Kopp ticked through her lesson on essay construction. Then she gave her sophomores one more tip for their upcoming language arts test from the state.
“Please, don’t panic and say, ‘I can’t write,’ ” she called out. “Your ideas are good enough to put down on paper and have someone else read.”
Part educators, part cheerleaders, Kopp and her colleagues in Arrowhead’s special education department cajole students to finish their math homework, help them learn new reading strategies and prepare them for the state’s annual testing regimen.
Last year, the school’s 10th-graders with disabilities fell short of the state’s reading proficiency standard under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Under President George W. Bush’s signature change to federal education law, schools are evaluated based on how their students perform on state tests in math and reading.
Milwaukee Special Education Lawsuit
When Kina King goes through the classwork her children bring home from school, she has a hard time telling which belongs to 5-year-old Danielle and which belongs to 16-year-old Jamie.
That’s because Jamie, a freshman at Wisconsin Career Academy in Milwaukee, reads at the level of a second-grader. Her writing, with its d’s and b’s reversed and halting attempts at self-expression, is at a third-grade level.
King said she repeatedly had asked Milwaukee Public Schools to evaluate whether Jamie had special needs since the girl was 5. But it wasn’t until Jamie failed first grade for the third time that the district determined that she suffers from cognitive delays and needs additional support.
The question of what MPS should do to compensate the students it has failed to place in special education in a timely manner is at the heart of the third phase in an ongoing class-action suit about how MPS serves special education students. Jamie Stokes is the lead plaintiff in that suit and testified during a weeklong trial that wrapped up in November.
“If they gave her the help she would have been better, not doing coloring books her sister in kindergarten is doing,” King said.
An Interview with Kathleen Chamberlain: New IEP’s in N.Y.
Kathleen Chamberlain is the president of East End Special Education Parents, a not for profit parent advocacy group. She is mother of a child with a disability and formed EESEP with other local parents whose children were also not getting the special education services they felt they were entitled to. In addition to advocating for children with disabilities, she owns her own financial services firm. She lives with her husband, and daughter on Eastern Long Island in New York.
1) First of all, you are President of EESEP. What exactly is EESEP and what are you trying to do?
East End Special Education Parents is a not for profit parent advocacy group.Our main goal is to teach parents how to advocate for their children with disabilities and we have been very effective doing so.So effective in fact that our members are routinely trashed at local Board of Education meetings and in the local papers by school district administrations because knowledge is power and the school districts have it and sped parents don’t and they want to keep it that way.It’s our goal to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Gifted and challenged: When enlightening has to strike twice
Sarah Lemagie
Tyler Lehmann could read “Harry Potter” books before he started first grade, yet an anxiety disorder left him unable to speak to his teacher and all but one of his classmates in Woodbury. Simon Fink attends a school for gifted students in St. Paul, but Asperger’s syndrome can make it hard for him to interact with peers and focus on lessons.
School can be tough for kids with challenges ranging from emotional disorders to ADHD or dyslexia. For gifted students, too, it’s not always a cakewalk, between boredom and the sense of isolation that can result from being a “brainiac.”
Then there are students such as Tyler and Simon, who fall into both categories.
Raising children with learning barriers is a task in itself, “but when they’re bright and gifted and have a high IQ, it’s even more frustrating, because the teachers just don’t understand how to work with these kids,” said Bloomington parent Chelle Woolley, whose 17-year-old son, Matt, was in fifth grade when he tested out for both giftedness and attention deficit disorder.
A growing awareness of so-called “twice-exceptional” or “2X” students, many of whom qualify for both gifted and special education services, is prompting some researchers to take a closer look at their needs. This fall, educators at the University of St. Thomas and four metro-area school districts are using a $490,000 federal grant to launch a five-year project aimed at developing better ways to teach 2X children, helping schools identify them and training teachers to work with them.
My Son Was Autistic. Is He Still?
Paging through 176 MRI scans of my 9-year-old’s brain on my home computer, I discovered a button that let me play them as a movie. Gray swirls burst onto the screen, dissolving into one another and revealing a new set of patterns. Beams of light faded in and out, some curving and traveling around the different regions of his brain. I saw the squiggly folds of his cerebral cortex, the gray matter that is the center of human intelligence.
These scans, the most intimate pictures I had ever seen of my son, Leo, may help researchers understand what’s going on in his head — and relieve him of a diagnosis that I have devoted several years to helping him overcome.
Leo, identified as No. C1059, underwent the scans as part of a research study at the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut. He was thrilled to earn $200 for taking part. I smiled along with him, because I could remember the days when he had a limited range of emotions, and pride was not one of them.
Beautiful
D-PAN: Deaf Performing Artists Network. Worth Watching.
ADHD Primer for Parents Part I
Although called Attention Deficit Disorder, and thus many parents and teachers believe that the primary problem is distractibility or poor attention, in reality this disorder is primarily a disorder of impaired executive function. When an individual has ADHD, executive functions are not emerging or unfolding as expected for the child chronological age. By executive functions I refer to a wide range of central control process of the brain that temporaneously connect, prioritize and integrate cognitive functions in the same manner that a conductor directs a band. Clearly, this does not refer to a single task at a given point in time such as focusing on getting a hamburger when hungry, or pushing a button at a given moment in order to stop a character is a video game from going forward. But, it does mean there is impairment in the ability to sustain concentrated focus on a task that requires constant monitoring and adjustment, as well as intermediate and long-term projection into the future such as driving a car, following a complicate classroom lecture or interacting with others and anticipating their reactions and the long-term outcomes of my statements or actions. In short, impaired executive functions negatively impact the real stuff of day to day life.
Will Blewett be the last Milwaukee Public Schools board president?
If there is a case to be made for dissolving the Milwaukee Public Schools board, several of its members, but particularly its president, Peter Blewett, seemed hell bent on making it during last week’s budget meetings.
That the end result of those meetings–a double digit increase in the district’s property tax levy–was the only responsible option the board could have chosen, won’t do anything to assuage the board’s growing number of critics or even improve its standing among its supporters.
Blewett has had a long time (a year, in fact, since the last budget fiasco) to persuade the public and other elected officials that the board and Superintendent William Andrekopoulos have the ability to manage the district’s complicated finances. And while the scores of people who showed up to support an increase in the tax levy made an impressive display, their presence seemed more in support of an idea and not an endorsement of those behind it. It’s notable that, as far as I know, not one elected official spoke out in support of the board’s actions despite the fact that everyone is aware of the poor hand MPS is dealt when it comes to state funding.
Palin Promises School Choice for Disabled Students
In her first policy speech of the presidential campaign, Gov. Sarah Palin vowed Friday that a McCain administration would allow all special-needs students the choice of attending private schools at public expense, a controversial and potentially costly proposal likely to be welcomed by many parents and bitterly opposed by many school districts.
Ms. Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president, also promised that she and Senator John McCain would finally provide public schools the federal money that was promised when the law covering students with special needs was passed in 1975. Her pledge was intended to address the top concern of many school districts, and is one that has been made by many other politicians but never fulfilled.
The policy speech was a departure for Ms. Palin, whose métier is the kind of foot-stomping pep rally she headlined the night before, at a stop north of Pittsburgh, where she recalled an anecdote about “Joe the quarterback” — as in Namath, a local native — to “guarantee” that she and Mr. McCain would come from behind to win.
In a hotel meeting room before about 150 parents and children with special needs, Ms. Palin was more subdued, and departed slightly from her prepared remarks to speak of her fears when she learned that the baby she was carrying earlier this year would have Down syndrome.
The Madison School District spent $70,582,539 on Special Education, according to the 2007/2008 Amended Budget (,a href=”http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/pdf/2008/10/2007_MMSD_BOE_Amended_Budgetocr.pdf”>460K PDF). Total budget was $365,248,476 according to the same document.
Wisconsin Forum on Special Education 11/17/2008 in Madison
Via a kind reader’s email:
The State Superintendent’ s Council on Special Education will be holding a public forum to gather input on matters related to special education in Wisconsin. Information obtained will be used by the Council in advising the Department of Public Instruction on matters affecting the education of Wisconsin ‘s children and youth with disabilities.
This public forum will be held Monday evening, November 17, 2008 from 5:00 to 7:00 PM at the Madison Marriott West, Salon D (1313 John Q. Hammons Drive Middleton, Wisconsin; 608/831-2000).
Should you have any questions related to this public forum, do not hesitate to contact Chair Myrah at gary.myrah@pwssd.k12.wi.us or (262) 268-6079.
On Washington, DC’s Special Education Governance
The District’s top special education official testified in federal court yesterday that some school personnel ignore scheduled meetings with parents, contributing to the city’s failure to meet the needs of students with learning disabilities or behavioral challenges.
Richard Nyankori, acting deputy chancellor for special education, said the backlog of D.C. children awaiting special education services is lengthy in part because school staff don’t show up for meetings, leaving cases unresolved and parents in the lurch.
“Sometimes it is willful on the part of some staff not to make it to meetings,” Nyankori said under questioning from U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman.
Friedman called the hearing to quiz officials about the District’s lack of progress in complying with a 2006 consent decree that settled a class action brought by parents of children with learning problems. The District’s public and public charter schools have nearly 11,000 special education students. About 20 percent attend private schools, at a cost to taxpayers of about $200 million, because D.C. cannot meet their needs.
Reaching an Autistic Teenager
On a typical Monday morning at an atypical high school, teenage boys yanked open the glass doors to the First Baptist Church of Decatur, Ga. Half-awake, iPod wires curling from their ears, their backpacks unbuckled and their jeans baggy, the guys headed for the elevator. Arriving at Morning Meeting in the third-floor conference room, Stephen, his face hidden under long black bangs, dropped into a chair, sprawled across the table and went back to sleep. The Community School, or T.C.S., is a small private school for teenage boys with autism or related disorders. Sleep disturbances are common in this student body of 10, so a boy’s staggering need for sleep is respected. Nick Boswell, a tall fellow with thick sideburns, arrived and began his usual pacing along the windows that overlook the church parking lot and baseball diamond. Edwick, with spiky brown hair and a few black whiskers, tumbled backward with a splat into a beanbag chair on the floor.
“O.K., guys, let’s talk about your spring schedules,” said Dave Nelson, the 45-year-old founding director. He wore a green polo shirt, cargo shorts and sneakers and had a buzz haircut and an open, suntanned face. After his son Graham, 19, was given a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (A.S.D.) as a young child, Nelson left the business world and went into teaching and clinical and counseling work. On that Monday, he was instantly interrupted.
“I had a very bad night!” Edwick yelled from the floor. “Nightmares all night!”
Bringing Special-Needs Schools Closer to Home
Tom Holohan, a 16-year-old with autistic symptoms, grew up paralyzed by fear and anxiety about leaving his family’s home. But for the last two years, Tom has had to commute to a Connecticut boarding school that specializes in treating his disability, returning on weekends to his home in Farmingdale, N.Y.
“There’s always this thing inside you that you want to be home,” said Tom, who attended five day schools here on Long Island and tried home schooling before his local school district sent him to the Connecticut school, Devereux Glenholme. “I mean, I got used to living there, but every day I think about what’s going on at home. It’s really difficult.”
Next year, Tom is hoping to attend Westbrook Preparatory School, a $2.5 million institution that will be New York State’s first residential school for students with high-functioning autism and that was founded after intense lobbying by parents, including Tom’s mother, Maureen Holohan, 48, who is on the school’s governing board. The new school, to serve 24 middle and high school students with average or above-average intelligence but in need of significant emotional and social support, is part of a statewide push to bring special education students back from out-of-state private schools by creating publicly financed alternatives closer to home.
Bringing Special-Needs Schools Closer to Home
Tom Holohan, a 16-year-old with autistic symptoms, grew up paralyzed by fear and anxiety about leaving his family’s home. But for the last two years, Tom has had to commute to a Connecticut boarding school that specializes in treating his disability, returning on weekends to his home in Farmingdale, N.Y., about nine miles from here.
“There’s always this thing inside you that you want to be home,” said Tom, who attended five day schools on Long Island and tried home schooling before his local school district sent him to the Connecticut school, Devereux Glenholme. “I mean, I got used to living there, but every day I think about what’s going on at home. It’s really difficult.”
Next year, Tom is hoping to attend Westbrook Preparatory School, a $2.5 million institution that will be New York State’s first residential school for students with high-functioning autism and that was founded after intense lobbying by parents, including Tom’s mother, Maureen Holohan, 48, who is on the school’s governing board. The new school, serving 24 middle and high school students with average or above-average intelligence but in need of significant emotional and social support, is part of a statewide push to bring special education students back from out-of-state private schools by creating publicly financed alternatives closer to home.
Re-examine testing of special ed students
Almost half of children with special needs failed their high school exit exam this year. Legislation calls for identifying new ways to assess performance and devising new methods.
The predictable result came in last week from forcing students with disabilities to pass a high school exit exam in order to earn a diploma. Nearly half failed.
Failed. Demoralizing words for some kids who struggle daily to perform tasks most teens carry out with ease.
The psychological damage “is horrific,” says Sid Wolinsky, director of litigation for Disability Rights Advocates, which fought unsuccessfully for alternative ways to measure the knowledge of special education students.
“We had dozens of sworn declarations from parents about the deep depression that their disabled children went into when they didn’t pass the exit exam,” Wolinsky says. “When you’re a child with a disability, you start with problems of stigma, societal stereotyping and self confidence.
“Then you’re shattered when you can’t pass the exit exam. You blame yourself and have terrible problems with self worth.”
Becoming an Autism Educator
For the first time in my six-year teaching career, I am not completely freaked out by going back to school. I have, however, more than paid my dues to reach this stage of teacher emotional stability. In my first year of teaching, I freaked out not only in September, but pretty much every day (and well into every night) of the school year. At the time, I taught teenagers with learning disabilities in the South Bronx, including many emotionally disturbed students. I somehow managed to stick it out, and the next year, I met a Bronx teenager who would change my life and set me on my current career path.
Jeremy has Asperger’s syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism. As guilty as I feel admitting this as a teacher, there’s no denying that Jeremy was my favorite student. He may always be. While other teachers seemed exasperated by Jeremy’s autistic quirks, I got along with him easily. We hung out during lunch. He fixed the classroom computers and shared his unique life insights. He also easily passed a New York State Science Regents exam on his first try, which quickly shifted the school administration’s attitude from, “We have to get rid of this kid,” to, “We need this kid for our numbers.” Sadly, Jeremy didn’t exactly receive a stellar public education in the Bronx. I often wondered how much further he could have gone had he received stronger educational support from an early age.
You Need to Take My Son to Jail
MY husband and I were sitting down to dinner when the police called. It was a female dispatcher whose voice I recognized from previous incidents involving my 20-year-old son, Andrew, who has autism.
In recent years, this police department has picked him up for shoplifting, taken reports from restaurants where he had dined and dashed, and once even brought him back from the airport after he tried to stow away on a plane.
Roughly half of the force has lectured me about keeping a closer eye on him, placing him in a secure facility, and finding a better psychiatrist, while the other half has been sweet and apologetic, concerned about how I’m bearing up.
On this occasion the dispatcher explained that my car, which I had earlier reported stolen, had been found on the side of the highway some 70 miles away in St. Cloud, Minn. — scratched, filthy and out of gas but otherwise undamaged. I would need to retrieve it from the impound lot. My son, unhurt, was waiting at the station. When would I be able to pick him up?
I swallowed a sip of Chianti and recited the line I had been rehearsing all afternoon: “I want to press charges.”
“I told you, the car is fine. Your son is fine. All you have to do is come pick them both up.”
“I want to press charges,” I said again, resolved to see this through.
“Against your son?” she asked, incredulous.
Eric Hainstock: Free at Last
Prison may be the best thing that ever happened to Eric Hainstock
Eric Hainstock’s first letter to Isthmus, dated April 15, 2008, got right to the point: “When I was 15 years old I shot my high school principal. I never meant for this to happen. He grabbed me from behind and I got scared. I was already pretty stressed, so that freaked me out even more. Please don’t get me wrong, I am not blaming Mr. Klang for grabbing me. But I am blaming him, the teachers, social services and the school as a whole for never listening to me…. No one ever listened.”
Like other communications to follow, the letter is a plaintive appeal for understanding, with a heavy dollop of self-pity. “No one ever listened”? Perhaps it felt that way to Hainstock.
“I want my story told,” wrote Hainstock, now 17, who picked Isthmus on the recommendation of his “celly,” a former Madison resident. “I want all the social service agencies to listen, the schools, parents all over the state.” He pegged his purpose as altruistic — to make sure no one else would ever have to “live in the hell that I did.” (Quotations from Hainstock’s letters have been edited for spelling and style.)
Out of Sight
For the 140 students lucky enough to attend the Texas School for the Blind, life is about team sports, class plays, American Idol parties, and prom night. In fact, it’s the one place where they can see themselves for who they really are: typical teenagers.
Three days before the prom at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, I stopped by House 573, a small girls’ dormitory on the school’s campus, in Austin. Tammy Reed, House 573’s sturdy, perpetually good-natured dorm manager—beloved for, among other things, her Tuesday night American Idol viewing parties, which include running commentary and hot wings—was telling me why the prom was the most thrilling night of the year for her girls. “Blind students usually don’t get asked to the prom,” she said as we sat at the kitchen table, which had been taken over by curling irons, cans of hair spray, bobby pins, Q-tips, nail polish, and costume jewelry. “And if they go to the prom, they end up standing against the wall. Everyone comes to our prom, and there won’t be a kid there who doesn’t dance.”
Support Grows for Disabled Job Seekers
Lucy Shi, a job seeker who has a genetic condition that causes short stature, says she’s happy to be singled out as a disability candidate as she hunts for a position in New York.
A graduate of New York University, Ms. Shi, 25, recently interviewed with several Wall Street firms at a recruiting event geared toward people with disabilities who aim to develop professional business careers. “It’s hard to have a disability that’s so visible, and it’s just nice to be able to talk to recruiters without competing with the rest of the world,” says Ms. Shi, who believes many interviewers view her as a child because of her height.
Meeting special needs through art
Pamela McLoughlin
Early in her career teaching special education, Beverly Levett Gerber once had an unusual mix of students; some had behavior problems, others developmental disabilities and some were gifted.
It was quite the challenge, but she knew how to achieve harmony.
“There were few things we could do together, but we could do the art work together at their rate and level,” Gerber said. “When you reach them at their level, they succeed.”
Gerber, a professor emeritus at Southern Connecticut State University who still teaches a course each semester, is a nationally recognized star in the fields of both art education and special education, most noted for combining the two seemingly divergent fields. Gerber taught at her alma mater, Southern, for 33 years before retiring from full-time work in 2003.
“Because of the uniqueness of the two fields coming together, I call myself a matchmaker,” Gerber, of Milford said with a twinkle in her eye.
Gerber’s commitment to the notion that art is a vehicle for special needs students to learn other subjects, to express themselves emotionally and show their level, has led to such groundbreaking progress in the field that colleagues from the National Art Education Association established The Beverly Levett Gerber Lifetime Achievement award to go each year to an outstanding art educator who works with special needs children.
Autism is “A Fraud, a Racket”
From Media Matters:
On July 16, the No. 3 syndicated radio talk show host in the country, Michael Savage, made the following statement on autism:
“Now, you want me to tell you my opinion on autism? … A fraud, a racket.”
Savage went on to say:
Now, the illness du jour is autism. You know what autism is? I’ll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is.
What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, “Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.”
Autism — everybody has an illness. If I behaved like a fool, my father called me a fool. And he said to me, “Don’t behave like a fool.” The worst thing he said — “Don’t behave like a fool. Don’t be anybody’s dummy. Don’t sound like an idiot. Don’t act like a girl. Don’t cry.” That’s what I was raised with. That’s what you should raise your children with. Stop with the sensitivity training. You’re turning your son into a girl, and you’re turning your nation into a nation of losers and beaten men. That’s why we have the politicians we have.
During the same broadcast, Savage also attacked those in “the minority community” who suffer from asthma. He stated: “[W]hy was there an asthma epidemic amongst minority children? Because I’ll tell you why: The children got extra welfare if they were disabled, and they got extra help in school. It was a money racket. Everyone went in and was told [fake cough], ‘When the nurse looks at you, you go [fake cough], “I don’t know, the dust got me.” ‘ See, everyone had asthma from the minority community.”
Michael Savage’s mean-spirited comments are disgusting and are an affront to basic decency.
Find your local Savage Station, log into our calling tool and tell your Savage station manager what you think of Savage’s tirade.
Policing kids with autism is a new challenge on the beat
A barefoot girl in her nightgown is picked up wandering along a dark Dane County highway. Sheriff deputies have no idea how the little girl got there, who she is, what happened to her, or where to take her.
A young man walks out of a camp for adults with cognitive disabilities and into the woods. It takes thousands of searchers a week to find Keith Kennedy — naked, weak, covered with scratches and ticks, but alive.
A 7-year-old with blue eyes slips out of the basement of his house in Saratoga. On the fifth day of a massive search, rescue dogs find Benjamin Heil in a nearby pond, drowned.
These recent Wisconsin cases all involved individuals with autism, a devastating brain disorder that impairs judgment and communication. Over the past decade, the number of children diagnosed with this disorder has multiplied tenfold, and the national Centers for Disease Control now considers autism to be a public health crisis. Autism frequently wreaks havoc not just on a child’s entire family, but on law and safety enforcement in the streets. The problem is expected to get worse as this population grows up.
Calm Down or Else
The children return from school confused, scared and sometimes with bruises on their wrists, arms or face. Many won’t talk about what happened, or simply can’t, because they are unable to communicate easily, if at all.
“What Tim eventually said,” said John Miller, a podiatrist in Allegany, N.Y., about his son, then 12, “was that he didn’t want to go to school because he thought the school was trying to kill him.”
Dr. Miller learned that Tim, who has Asperger’s syndrome, was being unusually confrontational in class, and that more than once teachers had held him down on the floor to “calm him down,” according to logs teachers kept to track his behavior; on at least one occasion, adults held Tim prone for 20 minutes until he stopped struggling.
The Millers are suing the district, in part for costs of therapy for their son as a result of the restraints. The district did not dispute the logs but denied that teachers behaved improperly.
The Third World Challenge
Bob Compton, via a kind reader’s email:
ersonally, I know that China and India are not “Third World” countries, but that is because I’ve traveled to those countries and I deeply admire their cultures and their people.
The inspiration for the name “Third World Challenge” came a statement made to me by a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education when I showed my film Two Million Minutes for the HGSE faulty. “We have nothing to learn from education systems in Third World countries,” he intoned with much gravitas, “Much less a Third World country that lacks freedom of speech.” To my surprise, no other faculty member rose to challenge that statement.
While I certainly expected a more open-minded and globally aware audience at Harvard, I have now screened my film around the country and a surprisingly large segment of the American population believes India and China’s K-12 education systems are inferior to that of the United States. While no American makes the statement with the boundless hubris of a Harvard professor, the conclusion often is the same – America is number one in education and always will be.
This of course is not true. American students’ academic achievement has been declining vis-à-vis other developed countries for more than 20 years. What is now surprising and worrisome is US students are even lagging the developing world.
Milwaukee Public Schools Lag in Special Education Funds
When it comes to state funding for some of the students who cost the most to educate, Wisconsin’s largest school system has been a big loser.
Over the past few years, as the state has ratcheted up its support for schools struggling with the costs of high-need special education students, the amount collected by Milwaukee Public Schools has barely budged.
Of the $5.4 million pool distributed this year, MPS took in just $40,182, according to an announcement by the state Department of Public Instruction. That puts MPS in the same range as Brown Deer, Manitowoc, and Montello, and the Milwaukee district received less than a third of the $131,390 that went to Middleton.
The Madison Metropolitan School District, the state’s second largest school district, got more than $1.4 million, and $439,673 was given to the Racine Unified School District.
Gaithersburg School Tailors Teaching To Help Students Cope With Asperger
The first day of kindergarten found Alex Barth in the principal’s office. The teacher had asked students to draw self-portraits. Alex had wanted to draw his in red crayon. There was no red crayon. Alex had melted down.
Alex was a capable child with superior intelligence — and no end of eccentricities. He would flee noisy school assemblies. He couldn’t bear the smell of the cafeteria. By the end of first grade, his mother was spending much of the day at Alex’s side.
Robyne Barth soon learned her son had Asperger syndrome, a developmental disorder on the autism spectrum. Children with the disorder, known in shorthand as Asperger’s, might have strong academic gifts but deficiencies in such social skills as carrying on a conversation and playing with others at recess.
Three Wisconsin students best in Braille
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction:
Students from Kenosha, Green Bay, and Madison are among the top Braille users in the United States and Canada, winning a competition held earlier this spring at the Wisconsin Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Janesville, as a part of the international Braille Challenge.
The three Wisconsin winners are eligible to attend the finals of the international Braille Challenge, which will be held in Los Angeles on June 27th.
The winners, Baylee Alger of Green Bay, Zachary Morris of Kenosha, and Amelia King of Madison, competed in reading comprehension, proofreading, spelling, dictation, and charts and graphs events as part of the challenge. Alger and Morris won top honors in the apprentice category for students in the first and second grades. Both attend their local school districts and receive Braille instruction from teachers of the blind: Alger from Kathleen Ford and Morris from Harry Ostrov. King has placed as a finalist twice before and won the competition in 2004. She currently attends the Wisconsin School for the Visually Handicapped in Janesville and has been a student at Madison Memorial High School.
Milwaukee Schools Ordered to Do More for Special needs
Jeffrey Spitzer-Resnick, the attorney representing the plaintiffs in the case, said Sunday that the decision will bring “the most substantial reform in MPS history,” one that will bring higher graduation rates, fewer discipline problems and improved test scores within a few a years.
MPS officials have fought the goals set forth in the decision of Federal Magistrate Judge Aaron Goodstein, saying they would lead to big increases in spending and taxes and actually harm children and lower educational standards. MPS spokeswoman Roseann St. Aubin said Superintendent William Andrekopoulos and School Board members had not yet seen the decision and did not want to comment until they met about it. She quoted Andrekopoulos saying only, “We’re going to continue to move forward with education reforms that meet the needs of all our children.”
Goodstein’s decision, signed Friday and circulated over the weekend, came down on every point in favor of the position of the plaintiffs, an organization now known as Disability Rights Wisconsin, and in favor of a settlement reached recently between that organization and the state Department of Public Instruction, which was also a defendant in the case. Goodstein rejected all grounds MPS offered for finding things wrong with that settlement.
Harriet Johnson, 50, Activist for Disabled, Is Dead
Harriet McBryde Johnson, a feisty champion of the rights of the disabled who came to prominence after she challenged a Princeton professor’s contention that severely disabled newborns could ethically be euthanized, died on Wednesday at her home in Charleston, S.C. She was 50.
No cause has been determined, her sister, Beth Johnson, said, while pointing out that her sister had been born with a degenerative neuromuscular disease. “She never wanted to know exactly what the diagnosis was,” Beth Johnson said.
The condition did not stop Harriet Johnson from earning a law degree, representing the disabled in court, lobbying legislators and writing books and articles that argued, as she did in The New York Times Magazine in February 2003, “The presence or absence of a disability doesn’t predict quality of life.”
Using a battery-powered wheelchair in which she loved to “zoom around” the streets of Charleston, Ms. Johnson playfully referred to herself as “a bedpan crip” and “a jumble of bones in a floppy bag of skin.”
Follow the Special Ed Money
Jay Greene is dubious about Response To Intervention — trying to educate children well so they’re not diagnosed as learning disabled — because he thinks schools have an incentive to put kids in special ed.
Essentially, RTI frees-up money to get schools to do what they presumably should have been doing already — providing well-designed instruction in the early grades. Unless we think that the main impediment to well-designed instruction was that schools lacked the funding to do it, diverting 15% of special education money to early-grade instruction will not get them to do anything significantly different from what they were already doing.
Experimental audio/visual therapies help some schools teach students to focus
A small but growing number of schools are using experimental therapies to retrain students’ hearing and vision, in essence reteaching them to hear and see. It’s a bid to reverse problems with the ability to focus and learn brought on by years of excessive TV, poor nutrition and, for some, in vitro drug exposure.
At Gordon Parks Elementary School, a charter school in Kansas City, Mo., 60% of kindergartners in 2004 failed a visual-skills test. Most had 20/20 vision, but they struggled to focus on moving objects, track lines of print and refocus from near to far.
That fall, Gordon Parks began regular lessons in visual skills. Therapist Cheryl Steffenella says dangerous neighborhoods and the ubiquity of TV and video games means many of her students “aren’t doing kid things” — climbing trees, jumping and running — that help develop visual and motor skills. Even playing video games that require a lot of eye movement exercises children’s vision minimally, she says.
Students with learning disabilities get extra attention at Walbridge, a private Madison school
One morning, students at Walbridge School used their fingers to trace letters representing sounds in a mix of sand and sparkling glitter on a paper plate.
When a student was squeamish about the task, he asked if he could trace with a pen instead of his finger.
This lesson is an example of the multisensory approach taken by Walbridge School, which was founded in 1986. The private, nonprofit school enrolls children in grades 1 through 8 at 7035 Old Sauk Road on the Far West Side.
“We teach children who learn differently, who cannot succeed with traditional ways of learning,” said Gary Lewis, head of the school.
The primary concerns for students at Walbridge are learning issues rather than behavioral, he said. Some have specific disabilities such as dyslexia, dysgraphia and attention deficit disorder.
Some students have other concerns such as confusion over space and time.
Parents turn to states for autism help
Jeff Sell, a Texas trial lawyer with four children, recently became a lobbyist for the Maryland-based Autism Society of America, a job that has him crisscrossing the country to persuade state lawmakers to make life easier for people who have the little-understood developmental disability.
He shut down his law firm, which had pursued legal cases linking autism with vaccines. But rather than move to Maryland, Sell is staying in Texas, so his twin 13-year-old sons can continue to receive state-financed treatment for their autism. If he moves, Sell said, his sons would be on a years-long waiting list for therapy that costs as much as $60,000 a year.
“I live in Texas, basically, because it’s economically feasible for me to survive in Texas,” Sell said.
One of the toughest problems facing autism patients, their families and policymakers is paying for treatment. Families are increasingly relying on states to help them cope with the financial, medical and educational needs.
Governors and lawmakers have tried to ease those costs with two different approaches: by requiring private insurers to pick up the tab for more services or by creating new or expanding existing public health programs, such as Medicaid, to cover autism treatment.
Seattle’s Special Education Reform
As a task force begins this spring to revamp Seattle Public Schools’ approach to special education, it’s likely many classrooms around the district will begin to look more like Eckstein’s. The details haven’t been worked out, but in general, the district will try to deliver services to the students instead of bringing the students to the services.
A consultant recommended Seattle try to include more students in general-education classes and educate more special-education students at their neighborhood schools.
As the diagnosis of disabilities becomes more refined, school districts nationwide are faced with students whose needs are more complicated. At the same time, districts face federal requirements to meet individual students’ educational needs in the least restrictive environment possible.
Balancing those two realities can be difficult, said Doug Gill, the director of special education for the Washington state Office of the Superintendent for Public Instruction.
“What I see is districts serving kids, sometimes with more complex needs, and as you see kids served with more complex needs, you need, really, a more specialized environment,” he said.
Seattle Special Education Review – Full Document (PDF). Seattle Special Education PTSA.
Nearness Learning: The Death of Distance
“Nearness learning” is a more appropriate term for what the Open University’s business school offers, according to its dean in an interview for Which MBA, published by the Economist Intelligence Unit
When the Open University (OU) was founded in 1969, it represented one of the most important educational innovations of the 20th century, not just in Britain, but across the world.
Established by Britain’s then prime minister, Harold Wilson, it is considered by many to be the first university to offer genuinely high-quality degrees through distance learning. It was originally to be called the “University of Air”, because most of its lectures took the form of late-night broadcasts on the BBC. Indeed, for many Britons of a certain age the Open University will be a formative memory. Long before Britain had transformed itself into a 24-hour society, most will remember the sinking feeling of finding out that, come midnight, the only thing on their television was a hirsute OU professor, dryly working his way through the laws of thermodynamics.
Something to consider with respect to the clash between District and Student interests.
Seminar tries to clear up confusion about inclusion
Julie Maurer hopes to see a day when parents of children with special needs, parents like her, don’t have to advocate for their children in public school
Maurer hopes the system changes and schools accept children, like her daughter, Jenny, as easily as children who will never carry a label like “learning disabled” or “emotionally disabled.”
Maurer’s daughter, now 20, attends the University of Wisconsin-Parkside after graduating from Racine Unified.
A small group of parents, educators and disability advocates spent a few hours Saturday at the United Way of Racine County, 2000 Domanik Drive, with University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee education professor Elise Frattura, clearing up the confusion of including special education students in regular education classrooms.
Those years, from elementary school through high school, were marked by Maurer’s struggles to get her daughter into regular classrooms instead of being isolated from the rest of the children her age.
A preschool teacher encouraged Maurer to read the federal special education law, so as to understand what she should expect her daughter to receive in school.
Kids with dyslexia are left behind
How’s this for a brainteaser?
President Bush’s top domestic policy achievement is an education reform law that demands no child be left behind by emphasizing early reading. Yet public school students with language-based learning disabilities such as dyslexia — disabilities that make it difficult to learn to read — are still being left behind.
I first came to the subject about seven years ago, when I met my future wife — a language therapist who helps children with dyslexia. My first lesson was humility. Reading had come easily for me, and so I was impatient with classmates who struggled to read.
Yet over the years, I’ve had the chance to interact with elementary school students who have dyslexia, and I’ve always come away impressed. It takes courage to get up in the morning and go to school even though you know you’re going to struggle. Yet you go. And tomorrow, you’ll go again.
NY Legislators Balk at Tying Teacher Tenure to Student Tests
In the latest rebuke to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s agenda, state lawmakers have decided to bar student test scores from being considered when teacher tenure determinations are made.
Legislators said the move was the final detail negotiated as part of the budget, which they expect to complete on Wednesday. It was a setback to efforts by the mayor and former Gov. Eliot Spitzer to hold teachers accountable by using student performance data, and a boon for the teachers’ unions, which hold enormous influence over the political process in the capital.
The new language being prepared for the state law says that for the next two years student scores will not be considered in decisions on teachers’ tenure; in the meantime, a commission is to be created to study the issue.
The move was denounced Tuesday night by the Bloomberg administration.
Milwaukee Special Education Lawsuit Settled
According to that statement, the settlement includes the appointment of an outside authority, paid by DPI, to monitor MPS’s compliance with state and federal special education law and establish standards for MPS.
The agreement will also create a parent trainer position that will be based at Wisconsin Family Assistance Center for Education, Training & Support. This person will support MPS parents and DPI will pay his or her salary.
MPS did not enter into the agreement, and issued a statment today calling DPI’s decision “a disappointment” because of the tax increase district officials say will result for local taxpayers.
According to the district’s statement, the MPS School Board sent a letter to the state Attorney General last month asking that negotiations continue.
New Microphones Are Bringing Crystal-Clear Changes
Jay Mathews
The little black devices, the shape and size of small cellphones, have begun to appear in hundreds of Washington area classrooms. Hanging from the necks of elementary school teachers in Alexandria and kindergarten and first-grade teachers in Prince George’s County, they might herald the most significant change in classroom technology since the computer, some predict.
They are infrared microphones, designed to raise the volume and clarity of teachers’ voices above the distracting buzz of competing noises — the hum of fluorescent lights, the rattle of air conditioning, the whispers of children and the reverberations of those sounds bouncing off concrete walls and uncarpeted floors.
“It makes it so much easier for the children but also for the teachers,” said Lucretia Jackson, principal of Alexandria’s Maury Elementary School, one of the first in the area to use the audio enhancement systems for all classrooms. All Alexandria elementary school teachers now have them. “They are no longer suffering from laryngitis,” Jackson said. “They don’t have to project their voices as much as they needed to do in the past.”
Asperger’s: My life as an Earthbound alien
CNN:
Recently, at 48 years of age, I was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. For most of my life, I knew that I was “other,” not quite like everyone else. I searched for years for answers and found none, until an assignment at work required me to research autism. During that research, I found in the lives of other people with Asperger’s threads of similarity that led to the diagnosis. Although having the diagnosis has been cathartic, it does not change the “otherness.” It only confirms it.
When I talk to people about this aspect of myself, they always want to know what it means to be an “Aspie,” as opposed to a “Neurotypical” (NT). Oh, dear, where to start . …
The one thing people seem to know about Asperger’s, if they know anything at all, is the geek factor. Bill Gates is rumored to be an Aspie. We tend to have specialized interests, and we will talk about them, ad infinitum, whether you are interested or not. Recognizing my tendency to soliloquize, I often choose silence, although perhaps not often enough. Due to our extensive vocabularies and uninflected manner of speaking, we are called “little professors,” or arrogant.
Colorado School District Drops Grade System
One Colorado school district is going to shake things up by getting rid of grades.
The move includes traditional letter grades and grade levels.
The Adams County School District 50 school board approved a new system that lets students progress at their own pace.
Students will need to master 10 skill levels to graduate. They could end up graduating earlier, or later than fellow classmates. It just depends upon how long they need in order to master the skills.
District administrators says the new system will focus on students’ competence, rather than achievement for grades.
There are other school districts across the country that have adopted this type of system.
The district says it will put an explainer on transcripts for students applying to college, since the students will not have grade point averages or class rankings.
Related: Proposed Madison School District Report Card/Homework Changes.
School Cell Phone Policy
As it stands, Madison school district policy strictly forbids students from having cell phones in school. The Student Senate will recommend to the School Board next month that phones be allowed to be used before and after school and during lunch.
“I don’t know many teenagers who would like to be separated from their cell phone,” said Laura Checovich, 17, president of the Student Senate and a student at West High School.
“Right now, the current policy is that you could be expelled just for having one in your backpack or in your pocket. We thought that was pretty drastic and thought it needed to be looked at again,” she said.
Some students leave their cell phones in their lockers, but Checovich estimates that between 80 and 90 percent of students keep their phones in their pockets or backpacks, which is prohibited under current school policy.
The School Board directed the Student Senate in December to research and recommend potential changes to district policy on cell phone use in schools. The Senate’s recommendations will be confined to policy in the high schools. The Senate will present its findings to the board at a 5 p.m. meeting April 14 at La Follette High School.
Moore’s Law, Culture & School Change
Here, buried in my sixth paragraph, is the most important nugget: we’ve reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.
I came to this conclusion recently while attending Brainstorm 2008, a delightful conference for computer people in K-12 schools throughout Wisconsin. They didn’t hold breakout sessions on technology battles or tactics, but the idea was in the air. These people were under siege.
I started writing educational software in 1978. The role of instructional technology has changed since then from a gimmick to a novelty to an effort to an essential component of any curriculum. Kids can’t go to school today without working on computers. But having said that, in the last five years more and more technical resources have been turned to how to keep technology OUT of our schools. Keeping kids from instant messaging, then text messaging or using their phones in class is a big issue as is how to minimize plagiarism from the Internet. These defensive measures are based on the idea that unbound use of these communication and information technologies is bad, that it keeps students from learning what they must, and hurts their ability to later succeed as adults.
But does it?
These are kids who have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. But far more important, there is emerging a class of students whose PARENTS have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. The Big Kahuna in educational discipline isn’t the school, it is the parent. Ward Cleaver rules. But what if Ward puts down his pipe and starts texting? Well he has.
Andy Hertzfeld said Google is the best tool for an aging programmer because it remembers when we cannot. Dave Winer, back in 1996, came to the conclusion that it was better to bookmark information than to cut and paste it. I’m sure today Dave wouldn’t bother with the bookmark and would simply search from scratch to get the most relevant result. Both men point to the idea that we’re moving from a knowledge economy to a search economy, from a kingdom of static values to those that are dynamic. Education still seems to define knowing as more important than being able to find, yet which do you do more of in your work? And what’s wrong with crimping a paragraph here or there from Cringely if it shows you understand the topic?
This is, of course, a huge threat to the education establishment, which tends to have a very deterministic view of how knowledge and accomplishment are obtained – a view that doesn’t work well in the search economy. At the same time K-12 educators are being pulled back by No Child Left Behind, they are being pulled forward (they probably see it as pulled askew) by kids abetted by their high-tech Generation Y (yes, we’re getting well into Y) parents who are using their Ward Cleaver power not to maintain the status quo but to challenge it.
There’s no question that revolution is in the air. The education process is ripe for change for a number of reasons, including those mentioned by Cringely. We’ve seen substantial education spending increases over the past decade, which are unlikely to continue growing at the same pace, given other spending priorities such as health care and infrastructure. The ongoing flap over the proposed Madison report card changes is another example of change in the air. Links:
Cringely has posted a followup article here.
In the Mainstream but Isolated
Victoria Miresso cannot button a shirt, match a sock or tell one school bus from another. Yet at Roberto Clemente Middle School in Germantown, she is expected to function much like any other sixth-grader, coping with class changes, algebra quizzes and lunchroom bullies.
Victoria’s parents say she is a victim of inclusion: a trend, in Montgomery County and across the nation, toward shutting down traditional special education classes and placing special-needs students in regular classrooms at neighborhood schools.
“At this point, we’re about halfway through the school year, and she hasn’t learned anything,” said Laura Johnson, her mother. “It’s not fair for her to go to school and sit there and be teased because she doesn’t understand what they’re teaching her.”
Montgomery school officials say Victoria is no victim. She is, however, one of the first generation of students who cannot attend secondary learning centers, a network of self-contained classrooms open to special education students at eight middle and high schools in the county since the 1970s. Montgomery school leaders decided in 2006 to phase out the centers, part of an ongoing shift of special-ed students and teachers out of separate classrooms and into the general school population.
Wait for Autism Care Outlasts Bill
Cindy Brimacombe has known for almost two years that her son has autism, but she won’t be able to get him the full treatment he needs until next year because of a long waiting list.
Republicans and Democrats in the Legislature both had plans that would have helped Brimacombe and her 3 1/2 -year-old son, Max. But they ended their session last week without a compromise, guaranteeing that nothing will change until next year.
“It’s so sad,” the Oconomowoc mother said of the stalemate. “It’s so sad because these children have so many special gifts. . . . How can you deny these little ones help?”
Such is the nature of a Capitol under split control, where little gets done but lawmakers build up records they can tout on the campaign trail.
District critical of costs to settle special education litigation
Private negotiations to settle a lawsuit over how Milwaukee Public Schools handles special education students broke into the open Thursday when MPS rejected a proposal that could extend such services to thousands of students who are suspended from school frequently or held back a grade.
With harsh words particularly for the state Department of Public Instruction, MPS leaders said the proposed settlement could cost tens of millions of dollars, harm the education of students who don’t need special education services and interfere with the pursuit of broader goals for improving MPS.
But Jeffrey Spitzer-Resnick, an attorney for Disability Rights Wisconsin, which brought the suit in 2001, said the agreement was a “fantastic” opportunity for MPS and that MPS had not negotiated in good faith. He said it was frustration with MPS negotiators that led his organization and DPI to reach a separate settlement and to demand MPS take it or leave it.
The terms of the settlement would put special education in MPS under the control of an outside authority; require MPS to make major improvements in identifying students who need special education services; and potentially extend services to thousands of students.
Oconomowoc Must Pay for Disabled Student
The Oconomowoc Area School District must pay the educational costs of a disabled man placed by Winnebago County court order in a residential treatment center within district boundaries, an appeals court has decided.
Officials involved in the case say it could affect other school districts that host residential care and education centers, which often serve the most drastically disabled and costly students.
“Special education tuitions can run thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Oconomowoc Superintendent Patricia Neudecker said.
The ruling affirms a decision by the state Department of Public Instruction that transferred the financial burden of the man’s education at the Oconomowoc Developmental Training Center to the Oconomowoc district once he reached 18 and moved to an adult residential facility located in the district.
The DPI had argued that while state law exempts local school districts from paying the costs of students placed by court order in residential care centers such as the one in Oconomowoc, that exemption does not apply to adult students living in community facilities.
Neudecker said her district challenged the state’s decision to assign to it the educational costs of a person who had never been enrolled in the school system or lived there before his court-ordered placement, not only because of the financial burden but also because of the larger implications.
Autism Breakthrough: Girl’s Writings Explain Her Behavior and Feelings
Autism Breakthrough: Girl’s Writings Explain Her Behavior and Feelings
Two years ago, working with pictures and symbols on a computer keyboard, she started typing and spelling out words. The computer became her voice.
“All of a sudden these words started to pour out of her, and it was an exciting moment because we didn’t realize she had all these words,” said speech pathologist Barbara Nash. “It was one of those moments in my career that I’ll never forget.”
Then Carly began opening up, describing what it was like to have autism and why she makes odd noises or why she hits herself.
“It feels like my legs are on first and a million ants are crawling up my arms,” Carly said through the computer.
Special ed’s costs endanger other programs
The Demarest school district eliminated health insurance for teacher’s aides.
Becton Regional High School canceled the school play.
Ramsey postponed repairs to an athletic field so dangerous that the track team hosted meets in nearby towns.
The reason: skyrocketing special-education bills.
“It’s uncomfortable,” said Ramsey Superintendent Roy Montesano. “You don’t ever want to have it appear that we’re taking away, because we don’t want it to be a fight between general education and special education.”
Districts are under intense financial pressure after five years of flat state funding, rising health-care costs, public despair over sky-high tax bills and a law capping tax increases. At the same time, costs for New Jersey’s neediest special-education students have tripled to $595 million.
The Truth About Autism: Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know
The YouTube clip opens with a woman facing away from the camera, rocking back and forth, flapping her hands awkwardly, and emitting an eerie hum. She then performs strange repetitive behaviors: slapping a piece of paper against a window, running a hand lengthwise over a computer keyboard, twisting the knob of a drawer. She bats a necklace with her hand and nuzzles her face against the pages of a book. And you find yourself thinking: Who’s shooting this footage of the handicapped lady, and why do I always get sucked into watching the latest viral video?
But then the words “A Translation” appear on a black screen, and for the next five minutes, 27-year-old Amanda Baggs — who is autistic and doesn’t speak — describes in vivid and articulate terms what’s going on inside her head as she carries out these seemingly bizarre actions. In a synthesized voice generated by a software application, she explains that touching, tasting, and smelling allow her to have a “constant conversation” with her surroundings. These forms of nonverbal stimuli constitute her “native language,” Baggs explains, and are no better or worse than spoken language. Yet her failure to speak is seen as a deficit, she says, while other people’s failure to learn her language is seen as natural and acceptable.
And you find yourself thinking: She might have a point.
MPS chief sees voucher inequities
The rising number of special education students in Milwaukee Public Schools is having a growing financial impact and should be given greater recognition in any comparison of MPS and private schools in the voucher program in the city, MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said in a statement Wednesday.
Andrekopoulos was reacting to research about voucher schools released Monday.
He said concerns about the impact of the voucher program on property taxes in Milwaukee had been verified by the research.
Researchers based at the University of Arkansas said that city property taxes go up for each student who uses a voucher, compared to what would be the case if that student went to MPS, while state income taxes go down, as do property taxes in most of the rest of the state.
Related editorial.
DC Schools Chancellor Wants to Test “Differentiated Learning”
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee plans to establish an experimental program that would offer customized lessons for disabled, regular and gifted students in the same classroom, a key component of her strategy to reduce exorbitant special education costs.
Rhee’s proposal would launch a “differentiated learning” laboratory at West Elementary School in Northwest Washington, then replicate it citywide. Under the proposal, which is being met with skepticism from some West teachers and parents, the system would hire a private special-education school to run the program.
The proposal is among several actions Rhee is taking to overhaul special education, which for years has lacked high-quality programs for learning-disabled and physically disabled students. The system spends about $137 million on private school tuition annually for about 2,400 children (out of more than 9,400 disabled students) whom it cannot serve in the public schools.
Since 2006, the D.C. public schools have been under a federal court order to eliminate a backlog of more than 1,000 decisions from hearing officers regarding placement of students in special education programs. The order stemmed from a consent decree that settled a class-action suit filed by parents protesting the system’s long delay in providing services for the students.
Federal law requires schools to practice “inclusion” — putting special education students in regular classrooms whenever possible — a mandate the system has ignored in countless cases, advocates say. Under differentiated learning or differentiated instruction, an approach that has been used in schools in Prince George’s and Montgomery counties and across the nation over the past decade, students are grouped in the same classroom according to their ability levels and learning styles. They get the same lesson but are given different assignments and tasks based on their abilities.
For instance, a third-grade class in St. Louis recently was assigned to report on Martin Luther King Jr., with some students writing a timeline, others illustrating pages and others comparing the era of the slain civil rights leader to today.
Rhee is proposing to go a step further than most other districts using the concept. She wants to treat all students in the differentiated instruction classrooms much like special education students, with each getting an education plan outlining how teachers would address the child’s specific strengths, weaknesses and learning style.
Special education “is about individualization of instruction — that is going to be the overarching theme of these schools. Every kid — gifted kids — need really good individualization,” Rhee said in an interview. “All kids will benefit when we’re operating in that manner.”
School For Autistic Children Raising $250,000 For Operational Costs
WISC-TV first told the story of Common Threads back in October when the school opened.
Common Threads is a place where children can learn to overcome some of the communications challenges of autism.
It also provides support and services for families who aren’t able to get it anywhere else.
“I don’t know what else we’d do,” said mother Krysia Braun. “Honestly I’d probably have to go to preschool with him in order to make sure that he was getting the most out of it. If you’re going to spend money to go to private school, the kids need the support, and we find it at Common Threads”
On Sunday, the school held a fundraiser hoping to raise the $250,000 needed for the school’s operational costs.
“It’s necessary to help with our operating expenses during the first year of startup,” said Common Threads executive director Jackie Moen. “We are assimilating the children in slowly so they are fully supported and then they feel comfortable and understood and then we’ll bring in perhaps one to two children a week.”
Chromosomal Abnormalities Play Substantial Role In Autism
Genome-wide scans of families affected by autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have revealed new evidence that previously unknown chromosomal abnormalities have a substantial role in the prevalent developmental disorder, according to a new report. Structural variants in the chromosomes were found to influence ASD with sufficiently high frequency to suggest that genomic analyses be considered in routine clinical workup, according to the researchers.
Urban Schools Aiming Higher Than Diploma
At Excel High School, in South Boston, teachers do not just prepare students academically for the SAT; they take them on practice walks to the building where the SAT will be given so they won’t get lost on the day of the test.
In Chattanooga, Tenn., the schools have abolished their multitrack curriculum, which pointed only a fraction of students toward college. Every student is now on a college track.
And in the Washington suburb of Prince George’s County, Md., the school district is arranging college tours for students as early as seventh grade, and adding eight core Advanced Placement classes to every high school, including some schools that had none.
Those efforts, and others across the country, reflect a growing sense of urgency among educators that the primary goal of many large high schools serving low-income and urban populations — to move students toward graduation — is no longer enough. Now, educators say, even as they struggle to lift dismal high school graduation rates, they must also prepare the students for college, or some form of post-secondary school training, with the skills to succeed.
On Parenting: Reassuring Autism Findings
Parents of children with autism don’t get much good news: It’s still not clear what causes the often devastating disorder, which affects as many as 1 in 150 children and for which there is no cure. As a result, theories abound on potential causes, the most notorious being the 1960s-era notion of “refrigerator mothers.”
In recent years, much energy has been expended on arguing whether vaccines could cause autism: Some parents think that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine or thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative in other vaccines, is the culprit. Scientists, on the other hand, think autism is largely genetic, and have focused on looking for genes that could be at fault. That disconnect has been frustrating to parents and sometimes dangerous; an unproven treatment known as chelation therapy, which leaches heavy metals such as mercury from the body, resulted in the death of a 5-year-old boy in 2006 after he was administered the wrong drug.
The best evidence to date that vaccines are not responsible is published today in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Researchers with the California Department of Public Health found that the number of new cases of autism reported in California has risen consistently for children born from 1989 through 2003, which includes the period when thimerosal was phased out. Studies in other countries, including one from Canada published in 2007, have also exonerated vaccines and thimerosal.
How a School in Florida School Got Mainstreaming Right
Adam Nystrom remembers being taunted by classmates in middle school for needing so many special-education courses.
“They’d say, ‘Oh, that’s the retard class,’ and everybody would laugh,” recalls Adam, who suffers from a learning disorder that impedes reading ability. “I wouldn’t really say anything because there isn’t anything funny about it.”
Adam, now 20 years old, spent a tumultuous 13 years in the local public-school system. He played pranks on teachers and disrupted lectures with a talking pen that delivered punch lines from the movie “Napoleon Dynamite.” At Choctawhatchee High School, he struggled to pass Florida’s mandatory graduation test, taking the exam six times. Once, he drew a suspension.
But Adam’s academic journey ended in success. He became a varsity wrestler and was selected three times to be a part of the homecoming king and queen’s royal court. After graduating in 2006, he joined the Army, fulfilling a childhood dream.
A major force behind his turnabout: the school district’s program for mainstreaming special-education students into regular classrooms.
As the momentum for such programs has accelerated across the country, many have faced serious obstacles. Special-education students account for a disproportionate amount of discipline problems and sometimes commit violent acts. Teachers say they often lack the training and resources to handle them. Many parents have fought to keep schools and classrooms segregated, saying school administrators have used mainstreaming, also known as “inclusion,” as a pretext for cost cutting.
To free up funds for his special-education overhaul — which initially focused on elementary-school reading — Mr. Gaetz began by making deep cuts in central-office spending. He eliminated more than 40 administrative positions, saving the district about $6 million a year. Some displaced personnel took special-education positions in the schools, which were given additional funds and broad latitude to hire more psychologists, social workers and special-ed teachers as they saw fit. Educators say such site-based management of mainstreaming programs was rare at the time.
Vouchers for Disabled Students Popular but Limited
Georgia’s new Special Needs Scholarship program was built on the promise that public school families of disabled children would get more schooling options. It was, nonetheless, a disappointment for most first-year applicants. According to state Department of Education figures, of 5,750 families who applied for a tuition voucher, 85 percent either couldn’t find a campus to accept their children, couldn’t afford the additional private school costs or didn’t meet all of the scholarship’s eligibility criteria. Nearly 900 families are getting financial aid, however, and supporters are convinced more children will be helped next year if more schools are willing to accept the vouchers. State lawmakers narrowly passed Georgia’s first K-12 school voucher program in the spring. Modeled after a Florida program, the plan was to give families of public special-education students more educational choices by offering them tuition vouchers to use at participating private schools. When the program opened this summer, education department and school officials were flooded with telephone calls, e-mails and applications. By the September deadline, thousands had applied. Late last month, 899, or 15 percent, of them received tuition checks. Families looking for vouchers were stymied partly by timing. Still, families, special education advocates and private school administrators say one of the biggest obstacles to finding a new school was the cost. Parents are expected to pick up the tab for any tuition the voucher does not cover, as well as expenses such as transportation and physical therapy.
School To Continue Electric Shock
WCVB Boston
Officials Give School One Year Extension
BOSTON — State officials are allowing a controversial special education school to use electric shock treatments on students for another year.
But the state’s Office of Health and Human Services said the extension for the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center comes with conditions.
The decision comes after an August incident in which two emotionally disturbed students were wrongly given dozens of shocks after a prank call from a person posing as a supervisor.
After the Aug. 26 call, the teens, ages 16 and 19, were awakened in the middle of the night and given the shock treatments, at times while their legs and arms were bound. One teen received 77 shocks and the other received 29. One boy was treated for two first-degree burns.
A New Approach to Correcting Autism
The causes of autism remain largely shrouded in mystery, but there are some types of the disorder that can be traced to specific gene defects. The most common of these — responsible for roughly 5% of autism cases — is a flaw in the X chromosome that causes a condition known as Fragile X Syndrome. Because the defect has been studied on a molecular level, it provides a unique window into understanding autism — and treating it. And that is why a paper published in this week’s issue of the journal Neuron is bound to generate excitement, even though the work was done in rodents. It shows that wide-ranging symptoms of Fragile X, which include epilepsy, impaired mental functioning, aberrant brain structure and other abnormalities, can be reversed. The work, researchers say, holds enormous promise for humans with Fragile X and probably for other forms of autism as well.
A school where autistic kids aren’t alone
A charter school that will serve students with autism-spectrum disorders in grades 6 to 10 is being hailed as a haven for teens with special needs — and their families.
You can see the ache in Tamara Phillips’ eyes.
As her autistic daughter, now 14, has grown, so too has the loneliness: her daughter’s loneliness in school, but also the parents’ loneliness — because having an autistic child can seem a solitary climb up a very long hill. “There’s a lot of pain,” Phillips said.
Tired of it feeling alone and weary of years of pushing public schools to better educate their kids, a group of parents of autistic children is starting a charter school specifically for older students with the disorder. When Lionsgate Academy opens, scheduled for the fall of 2008, it will be the only public school in Minnesota — and one of only a handful in the country — designed for children with autism-spectrum disorders.
Stop Playing the Victim – Become an Effective Advocate; or Why Can’t My Children Read?
When Alex entered kindergarten, his teacher noticed he was having difficulties. He could not pass the school readiness test. His pediatrician determined he had ADHD. No one told me he might also have learning disabilities.
Blake passed the readiness test and seemed to be doing fine until second grade. In third grade, he began to slip in reading and other subjects that required him to read.
I read to my kids. We did homework and extra work together. I made flash cards and bought computer programs to help them. Why couldn’t my children read?
Schools Accused of Mainstreaming to Cut Costs
For years, Jonathan Schuster’s mother begged the public schools here to put her son in a special program where he could get extra help for his emotional problems. By 11th grade, Jonathan had broken his hand punching a wall and been hospitalized twice for depression — once because he threatened to kill himself with a pocket knife.
But teachers insisted that Jonathan, who suffers from attention deficit disorder, learning disabilities and bipolar disorder, could get by in regular classrooms. His mother, Kathleen Lerch, says the reason was cost. “It was all about the bottom line,” she says. Citing confidentiality, school officials declined to discuss Jonathan’s case but said they seek to provide an appropriate education to all children.
Advocates for the disabled have long promoted the inclusion of special-education children in regular classes, a practice called mainstreaming. Many educators view mainstreaming as an antidote to the warehousing of children with special needs in separate, and often deficient, classrooms and buildings.
Now, some experts and parents complain that mainstreaming has increasingly taken on a new role in American education: a pretext for cost-cutting, hurting the children it was supposed to help. While studies show that mainstreaming can be beneficial for many students, critics say cash-hungry school districts are pushing the practice too hard, forcing many children into classes that can’t meet their needs. Inclusion has evolved into “a way of downsizing special education,” says Douglas Fuchs, a Vanderbilt University education professor.
Districts have a powerful motivation to cut special-education costs. U.S. schools spend almost twice as much on the average disabled student as they do on a nondisabled peer, according to a 2004 federal study. But the study also found that, in recent years, per-student special-education costs rose more slowly than for the general population. One of the likely reasons, researchers found, was cost savings from mainstreaming.
Study maps brain abnormalities in autistic children
Autistic children have more gray matter in areas of the brain that control social processing and sight-based learning than children without the developmental disability, a small study said on Wednesday.
Researchers combined two sophisticated imaging techniques to track the motion of water molecules in the brain and pinpoint small changes in gray matter volume in 13 boys with high-functioning autism or Asperger syndrome and 12 healthy adolescents. Their average age was 11.
The autistic children were found to have enlarged gray matter in the parietal lobes of the brain linked to the mirror neuron system of cells associated with empathy, emotional experience and learning through sight.
Those children also showed a decrease in gray matter volume in the right amygdala region of the brain that correlated with degrees of impairment in social interaction, the study found.
Group files lawsuit for disabled students
Jacob, a former Issaquah student with severe disabilities, used to love it when other students visited his special-education classroom.
His mother said it helped him learn how to talk to other kids.
So when Jacob, who has been diagnosed with autism and mental retardation, went to live at the state-run Frances Haddon Morgan Center in Bremerton, his mother expected similar success. For years, school-aged Morgan Center residents had attended Bremerton public schools.
But this year the district decided it no longer has the classroom space to accommodate them. Recently, the district reached an agreement with the state Department of Social and Health Services, which runs the Morgan Center, to open a classroom on the institution grounds.
On Wednesday, Disability Rights Washington filed a lawsuit saying that taking these youths out of public school violates state and federal laws against discrimination.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of eight youths ranging in age from 14 to 20, names the school district, the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction and DSHS as defendants, saying each played a role in the decision.
Parents of Disabled Students Push for Separate Classes
Last fall, groups who favor placing disabled students in regular classrooms faced opposition from an unlikely quarter: parents like Norette Travis, whose daughter Valerie has autism.
Valerie had already tried the mainstreaming approach that the disability-advocacy groups were supporting. After attending a preschool program for special-needs students, she was assigned to a regular kindergarten class. But there, her mother says, she disrupted class, ran through the hallways and lashed out at others — at one point giving a teacher a black eye.
“She did not learn anything that year,” Ms. Travis recalls. “She regressed.”
As policy makers push to include more special-education students into general classrooms, factions are increasingly divided. Advocates for the disabled say special-education students benefit both academically and socially by being taught alongside typical students. Legislators often side with them, arguing that mainstreaming is productive for students and cost-effective for taxpayers.
Some teachers and administrators have been less supportive of the practice, saying that they lack the training and resources to handle significantly disabled children. And more parents are joining the dissenters. People like Ms. Travis believe that mainstreaming can actually hinder the students it is intended to help. Waging a battle to preserve older policies, these parents are demanding segregated teaching environments — including separate schools.
More on from the Wall Street Journal on Mainstreaming.
Joanne has more.
Disability advocates sue to keep kids in school
AP:
A plan to educate a handful of developmentally disabled students at the state-run center where they live, rather than in public school classrooms, has drawn a lawsuit from an advocacy group.
Disability Rights Washington contends that the planned change, due to take effect at the end of the month, violates state and federal laws against discrimination.
This year the Bremerton School District apparently decided it no longer had the classroom space to accommodate the students, who range in age from 13 to 20. The district reached agreement with the state Department of Social and Health Services, which runs the Frances Haddon Morgan Center, to open a classroom on the center’s grounds.
“These children are being denied access to school purely because they have disabilities and live at an institution,” said David Carlson, a lawyer for the advocacy group.
Waukesha Schools go to Mediation over teacher contracts: Trading Jobs for Compensation?
The word “mediation” usually isnt all that menacing. But these days, and in this district, “mediation” packs plenty of punch.
A few weeks ago the Waukesha School Board announced it had taken its teachers to mediation. That means a neutral party will try to negotiate a settlement between the teachers union (the Education Association of Waukesha) and the board.
Whats most significant about the boards action is the mediator can declare an impasse and send the proposals to an arbitrator. And that, my friend, is a big deal.
Why? First, because arbitration is the labor-relations version of high-stakes poker. Its a winner-take-all proposition. Both sides present their proposal to a (supposedly) neutral third party, who picks the plan he or she believes fairest. There is no in-between – you win or you lose.
Arbitration also is a big deal because its hardly ever done, at least when state public schools are involved.
“Yes, its significant,” said David Schmidt, superintendent of the School District of Waukesha for the past 10 years. “Its the first time weve done it since Ive been here.”
Schmidt says he is fine with the teachers union, that the real trouble is in Madison. (The EAW is very much in agreement.) But right now, the problem has to be fixed closer to home. “What we can control locally are our expenditures,” Schmidt says.
Links and notes on Madison’s recent teacher’s contract.
Autism ‘Epidemic’ Largely Fueled by Special Ed. Funding, Shift in Diagnosing
A few decades ago, people probably would have said kids like Ryan Massey and Eddie Scheuplein were just odd. Or difficult.
Both boys are bright. Ryan, 11, is hyper and prone to angry outbursts, sometimes trying to strangle another kid in his class who annoys him. Eddie, 7, has a strange habit of sticking his shirt in his mouth and sucking on it.
Both were diagnosed with a form of autism. And it’s partly because of children like them that autism appears to be skyrocketing: In the latest estimate, as many as one in 150 children have some form of this disorder. Groups advocating more research money call autism “the fastest-growing developmental disability in the United States.”
Doctors are concerned there are even more cases out there, unrecognized: The American Academy of Pediatrics last week stressed the importance of screening every kid for autism by age 2.
More here.
Special ed is drawn into exam debate
With thousands of special-education students in Maryland high schools failing the state’s graduation exams, parents and advocates are deeply divided about whether these students should have to pass the tests.
The discussion is taking place as part of a larger debate by the state school board over whether all students, beginning with the Class of 2009, must pass High School Assessments in English, algebra, biology and American government before they can receive a diploma.
While about two-thirds or more of students are passing the tests, only about one-third of those in special education are doing so. There are about 30,000 special-education students in Maryland high schools.
Portsmouth School Board’s ADHD flier draws fire
Last month, the School Board sent a warning to parents about the “harmful effects” of drugs used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Much of the flier’s information was taken from the Internet, including from a Web site run by a group founded by the Church of Scientology.
This week, six national organizations and eight local groups sent a letter requesting that the School Board retract the flier and send a new one stating that ADHD is a disease that requires treatment.
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The groups include the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, the Virginia chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Tidewater chapter of Children and Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.
The flier was sent “to instill fear in parents,” said E. Clarke Ross, CEO of the Landover, Md.-based national office of CHADD. “It’s not based on published science, but on propaganda.
“This is the first time I’ve heard of this kind of propaganda being officially disseminated from a school system to its pupils,” Ross said.
Texas parents, schools spar over special needs
At age 9, Jodie threw tantrums so violent his elementary school threatened to call the police. The next year, the special education student tried to strangle an aide on the school bus, his mom said.
Diagnosed first with bipolar disorder and more recently as having Asperger syndrome, the bespectacled Kingwood boy has a history of biting, kicking, swearing and soiling himself to get attention.
Since he was in third grade, Humble Independent School District administrators have moved Jodie to at least three different schools. At one of the latest, the district’s center for children with emotional disturbances, Carol Allred found her son in a timeout room covered in his own waste.
She pushed then, as before, for taxpayer-funded private schooling.
But only this year, after Jodie had fallen behind two grades in reading and spent countless hours isolated from other students because of his outbursts, did school officials agree.
Site Posts Videos of Autistic Behaviors
What’s so unusual about a baby fascinated with spinning a cup, or a toddler flapping his hands, or a preschooler walking on her toes?
Parents and even doctors sometimes miss these red flags for autism, but a new online video “glossary” makes them startlingly clear.
A new Web site offers dozens of video clips of autistic kids contrasted with unaffected children’s behavior. Some of the side-by-side differences can make you gasp. Others are more subtle.
The free site, which makes its debut Monday, also defines and depicts “stimming,” “echolalia” and other confusing-sounding terms that describe autistic behavior. Stimming refers to repetitive, self-stimulating or soothing behavior including hand-flapping and rocking that autistic children sometimes do in reaction to light, sounds or excitement. Echolalia is echoing or repeating someone else’s words or phrases, sometimes out of context.
Ed Hughes and Marj Passman on Madison’s Small Learning Community Climate and Grant Application
I sent an email to Ed and Marj, both of whom have announced their plans to run for Madison School Board next spring, asking the following:
I’m writing to see what your thoughts are on the mmsd’s high school “reform” initiative, particularly in light of two things:
- The decision to re-apply for the US Dept of Education Grant next month
- The lack of any public (any?) evaluation of the results at West and Memorial in light of their stated SLC goals?
In other words, how do you feel about accountability? 🙂
They replied:
Marj Passman:
I am generally supportive of small learning communities and the decision to reapply for a Federal grant. Our high schools continue to provide a rich education for most students — especially the college bound – but there is a significant and maybe growing number of students who are not being engaged. They need our attention. The best evidence is that well implemented small learning communities show promise as part of the solution to increasing the engagement and achievement of those who are not being well served, do no harm and may help others also. My experience as a teacher backs up the research because I found that the caring relationships between staff and students so crucial to reaching those students falling between the cracks on any level of achievement are more likely to develop in smaller settings. Some form of small learning communities are almost a given as part of any reform of our high schools and if we can get financial help from the Federal government with this part of the work, I’m all for it.
I think it is important not to overestimate either the problems or the promise of the proposed solutions. The first step in things like this is to ask what is good that we want to preserve. Our best graduates are competitive with any students anywhere. The majority of our graduates are well prepared for their next academic or vocational endeavors. We need to keep doing the good things we do well. If done successfully, SLCs offer as much for the top achieving students as for any group – individual attention, focus on working with others of their ability, close connection to staff, and consistent evaluation.
You also asked about “accountability” and the evaluations of the existing SLCs. Both evaluations are generally positive, show some progress in important areas and point to places where improvements still need to be made. Neither contains any alarming information that would suggest the SLCs should be abandoned. The data from these limited studies should be looked at with similar research elsewhere that supports SLC as part of the solution to persistent (and in Madison) growing issues.
Like many I applauded when all the Board members asked for a public process for the High Schools of the Future project and like many I have been woefully disappointed with what I’ve seen so far. Because of this and the coming changes in district leadership I’d like to see the redesign time line extended (the final report is due in April) to allow for more input from both the public and the new superintendent.
Thanks for this opportunity
Marjorie Passman
http://marjpassmanforschoolboard.com
Ed Hughes:
From what I know, I am not opposed to MMSD re-applying for the U.S. Dept. of Education grant next month. From my review of the grant application, it did not seem to lock the high schools into new and significant changes. Perhaps that is a weakness of the application. But if the federal government is willing to provide funds to our high schools to do what they are likely to do anyway, I’m all for it.
Like you, I am troubled with the apparent lack of evaluation of results at West and Memorial attributable to their small learning communities initiatives. This may seem inconsistent with my view on applying for the grant, but I do not think we should proceed further down an SLC path without having a better sense of whether in fact it is working at the two schools that have tried it. It seems to me that this should be a major focus of the high school redesign study, but who knows what is going on with that. I asked recently and was told that the study kind of went dormant for awhile after the grant application was submitted.
My own thoughts about high school are pointing in what may be the opposite direction – bigger learning communities rather than smaller. I am concerned about our high schools being able to provide a sufficiently rich range of courses to prepare our students for post-high school life and to retain our students whose families have educational options. The challenges the schools face in this regard were underscored last spring when East eliminated German classes, and now offers only Spanish and French as world language options.
It seems to me that one way to approach this issue is to move toward thinking of the four comprehensive high schools as separate campuses of a single, unified, city-wide high school in some respects. We need to do a lot more to install sufficient teleconferencing equipment to allow the four schools to be linked – so that a teacher in a classroom at Memorial, say, can be seen on a screen in classrooms in the other three schools. In fact, views of all four linked classrooms should simultaneously be seen on the screen. With this kind of linkage, we could take advantage of economies of scale and have enough student interest to justify offering classes in a rich selection of languages to students in all four high schools. I’m sure there are other types of classes where linked classrooms would also make sense.
This kind of approach raises issues. For example, LaFollette’s four block system would be incompatible with this approach. There would also be a question of whether there would need to be a teacher or educational assistant in every classroom, even if the students in the classroom are receiving instruction over the teleconferencing system from another teacher in another school. I would hope that these are the kinds of issues the high school re-design group would be wrestling with. Perhaps they are, or will, but at this point there seems to be no way to know.
There are some off-the-top-of-my-head thoughts prompted by your question and by Maya Cole’s post about the high school re-design study. Feel free to do what you want with this response.
Related Links:
- Involving the Community (in High School Reform) by Maya Cole
- Madison Small Learning Community Grant Application / US Department of Education Response
- Examining the Madison West High SLC Grant Community Connection Results
- Examining the Madison West High SLC Grant Results
- Examining the Data from Earlier Grants, Part 1 (Memorial High School)
- Where does the MMSD get its numbers from?
Thanks to Ed and Marj for taking the time to share their thoughts on this important matter.
Special school or segregation?
“Here, he is totally independent,” said Witt, whose family moved to LaGrange a year ago. “He just fits, and he’s loving that.”
Witt’s interpretation bumps up against a more traditional definition of special-education law that, for the last three decades, has caused massive changes in how students with disabilities are educated, including the setting where they receive their instruction.
It’s that definition, which contends that disabled students should learn alongside non-disabled classmates as often as possible, that has prompted an ongoing lawsuit challenging the future of Lakeland School.
Jeffrey Spitzer-Resnick, managing attorney for Disability Rights Wisconsin, casts his group’s case against the school as a modern-day Brown vs. Board of Education. “Separate is not equal, and it certainly is not better,” said Spitzer-Resnick, whose group sued the Walworth County Board of Supervisors to prevent a new, larger home for Lakeland.
Students with disabilities who are taught separately miss the kind of social networking that helps them land jobs and become full members of their communities, Spitzer-Resnick said.
A School’s Autism Classes
THE teacher held up a laminated card, and 4-year-old Ryan Murphy tried to name the object shown: strawberries, oranges, a pair of pants.
But the lesson did not end there. Every time he got one right, the teacher instructed him to look at her and clap his hands. That was because Ryan and his five classmates have autism or a related disorder in this unusual preschool class at Radcliffe Elementary School and must be taught the social niceties and everyday interactions that come naturally to most other children.
Last month, the 4,000-student district here in Essex County started its first in-house program for autistic children after years of paying for them to be educated at specialized private schools. Nutley has seen a steady increase in autistic students with 27 children this year, about twice the number of children five years ago. In 2006, the district, which has an annual budget of $52.7 million, spent $984,964 on private school tuition and busing for autistic students alone, according to district officials.