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Mandate relief would provide districts with greater flexibility to meet student needs and to control spending without reducing the quality of education. A revised system without these costly (and in many ways outdated) mandates would better serve all of our students. Overall, enacting legislation to eliminate or modify mandates would provide much needed relief to taxpayers. [emphasis added]In a town of 19,000 people, 4000 have signed this letter, many or most of them parents, presumably. (Simply because parents are more likely to know about the letter).
I'm guessing that few of those who signed know what the words "in many ways outdated" signify.
I don't know what the words "in many ways outdated" signify, either, but I can guess. And my guess is that differentiated instruction, team teaching, and full inclusion for the most disruptive students (kids like my own two) is involved.
Granted, Eastchester could simply be angling to increase class size for the most disabled children (New York state regs here). I'm pretty sure I myself support some flexibility in a school's application of the law.
But the word outdated is a flag. As far as I know, Westchester administrators don't particularly believe that small class size is "outdated."*
Westchester administrators do believe that homogeneous grouping is outdated.
Do general education parents believe that special classes for children with severe disabilities, children who can tantrum and hit themselves for hours, are outdated?
* I have the sense that many administrators are frustrated by parent insistence on the smallest possible classes, but that is a different matter.
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Mainstreaming happened with NCLB here, but the call for mandate relief is still strong. The only hints of which mandates I've heard locally involve sped evaluation. No real specifics on whether that means enough less evaluations that there would be a significant letting go of psychs, OTs, PTsand sped teachers. The cost of proving the need for particular services is also mentioned a lot - apparently the burden is on the district, not on the family. I've also heard a little bit about medical reimbursement to the district for the aides being tricky as they can't get reimbursed unless the aides have certain qualifications and that's not always possible on a day to day basis. It seems to me that it would be a lot easier to have a state wide sped district so that nonsped academics and transport wouldn't be the balancer for the budget. Its crazy that one high needs child can move in to the district and 2 reg ed teachers be let go in order to fund the high need...we need our school staffed so that all academic needs are met.
Another observation I overheard in the budget meeting from someone who didn't want to go on record: It would be less costly to the district to buy a home for particular families in an area local to their child's out-of-district placement than to continue the 100 mile one-way bus routes. They were talking sped, but the effect on the transport cost for the homeless would be the same.
"In a town of 19,000 people, 4000 have signed this letter, many or most of them parents, presumably.."
Do they know what they were signing? When people talk about mandate relief here, they usually want more money from the state - not the ability to reduce services.
As I've mentioned in the past, our town is known for it's focus on full inclusion. People move (buy/rent)to our town with their SPED kids. In some (social) ways, it works out very well. For cost, the town might save some money by not sending kids out-of-town, but I don't think they expected the extra cost of people moving into our town. I think that some SPED parents find that full inclusion is not all that it's cracked up to be. Socially, it might be good, but academically, not.
The ignored problem is that they can't increase the ability spread in each classroom and have any hope that differentiated learning will work. Overall, they have to lower expectations and make them more fuzzy. They have to use curricula like Everyday Math that talks about trusting the spiral. They have to talk as if the low NCLB cutoffs define strong educational goals. They talk about the high percentage of kids who get over this minimum level. Some even claim that this makes us a strong school system. Since enough students (with help at home) make it into honors classes in high school, they don't address the fundamental flaws in their educational model.
When they went for a full inclusion policy here, the senior bureaucrats were quite frank (at least in-house)that it was for financial reasons. While providing appropriate support to kids with exceptionalities in general ed classrooms is in fact very costly, providing pseudo-support and platitudes is relatively cheap.
The move from the top was, perhaps synchronistically, aligned with a lot of pressure from parents and groups representing children with disabilities for full inclusion. I can remember a time when many parents fought to get their kids into special classes for LD, language impairment, Total Communication (for deaf kids) and so forth. Those programs had a record of long-term success in getting students caught up and capable of doing challenging academic work.
Fast forward to now.....the district stopped investing in PD for special ed teachers, most of whom nowadays have learned nothing at all about effective practices, specialized teaching curricula or methods (Orton-Gillingham, DI, Lindamood-Bell, etc. etc.) so results in special classes are no better than in general ed. No surprise there. If you aren't doing something different, why expect a different result?
OTOH, we still do have special programs for very violent kids, for kids with severe or multiple disabilities, and increasingly, for autism. To comply with the laws around least restrictive environment *some* special ed classes remain, even for LD or slow learners, but are hard to get into. That means many children who really need a segregated program may spend a number of years floundering in the full inclusion environment before any other opportunity presents itself.
At the elementary level, teachers are used to a range of development and ability -- but there are limits. If one classroom has several extremely disruptive students, or students 4-7 YEARS below the class norm, it makes effective teaching of the whole class problematic. Much teacher time is diverted to preparing individual lessons and materials for the outlier students (there is NEVER a budget for special materials for them), and these students need much more teacher attention -- which is taken away from other students. Aides also have been cut back so that often they are shared between a number of classrooms.
There are some positive effects of inclusion but the absence of the necessary supports for the learning needs of the included kids is a serious equity issue, IMO. The exceptional students are not getting the teaching they need, and the other students are inevitably deprived of some of the instruction -- and much of the enrichment for the high achievers -- that THEY need.
I see this as a false economy.
It would be less costly to the district to buy a home for particular families in an area local to their child's out-of-district placement than to continue the 100 mile one-way bus routes.
WHAT???????
Your district is transporting one SPED child ONE HUNDRED MILES EACH WAY EACH DAY?????
Do they know what they were signing? When people talk about mandate relief here, they usually want more money from the state - not the ability to reduce services.
BINGO!
BTW (this may belong on the other thread) - we have ALWAYS been worried about our kids being disruptive to the rest of the students, and we've always told the district we do NOT want our kids to harm other kids' learning.
Unfortunately, that's easier said than done because our kids are just as disruptive to OTHER SPED kids!
oh gosh, I have to tell that story.
Jimmy's teacher (who we love - she's Andrew's teacher now) called me one day, very upset and guilt-ridden: Jimmy had been punched in the nose by another student, who had LAID IN WAIT for Jimmy in the bathroom.
The other student had Down syndrome, as I recall, and he HATED all the noises Jimmy made. He hated them so much that he had actually come up with a plan to assault Jimmy when the two of them were alone, and then he had successfully executed that plan.
My ENTIRE reaction was: Wow. Good for that kid. (Seriously: this was an adolescent with mental retardation who was legitimately being driven nuts by Jimmy's noise, and who had managed to create and carry out a plan to do something about it. At least, Jimmy's teacher was convinced the punch was premeditated; I've forgotten how she explained it, but I'm sure she knew.)
Anyway, I also felt guilty that Jimmy was disrupting the day of a child who REALLY needs his learning time ....
Our school really tries to get Jimmy &, now, Andrew away from everyone else if they're tantruming -- they value the quiet needed by children with disabilities, too.
But it's a challenge.
(btw, I find that autistic children also seem to dislike OTHER autistic children's noisiness ..... )
The move from the top was, perhaps synchronistically, aligned with a lot of pressure from parents and groups representing children with disabilities for full inclusion. I can remember a time when many parents fought to get their kids into special classes for LD, language impairment, Total Communication (for deaf kids) and so forth.
Without having delved into the research, we were always in the anti-full inclusion group (which was small amongst the people we knew, it seemed).
otoh, we maxed out on separate programs away from the district. For several years Jimmy & Andrew attended a special school for autistic children & then a special program for autistic children that was housed in the basement of a school for regular ed. (Special programs are ALWAYS in the basement! That got to be a joke in our household. We'd go on our annual tour of whatever school building was going to be renting to BOCES this year, and we'd ask, "Where's the basement?")
At some point, we came to feel that the special programs weren't working at all. A great deal of this had to do with the fact that there were personnel problems at both programs (various firings & leavings & crises), but I tend to think that even if the programs had been going well we would have become discontent.
I came to feel that while I was right that full inclusion never normalizes your autistic child (as some parents I knew seemed to believe), I have failed to understand that integration may 'normalize' your child's familiarity with the regular world in some critical way.
And that integration (as opposed to full inclusion) normalized the regular kids' perceptions of autistic children.
Basically, I came to think that integration (special class in regular-ed school building, with as much non-disruptive inclusion as makes sense) was good for many of the same reasons any kind of social integration is good .....
Interestingly, I've seen several instances of parents of somewhat more moderately disabled kids being fine with separate classes, because their children could successfully play with typical peers for several hours after school and get their "normalizatin" that way. This works best in mixed-age gangs of kids with a "leader" kid with good people skills.
who had managed to create and carry out a plan to do something about it
Of course, I'm setting aside the fact that it wasn't a particularly effective plan!
I've seen several instances of parents of somewhat more moderately disabled kids being fine with separate classes, because their children could successfully play with typical peers for several hours after school and get their "normalizatin" that way. This works best in mixed-age gangs of kids with a "leader" kid with good people skills.
Years ago there was a professor at .... gosh. San Francisco State, maybe? ... who created what I thought was an amazing approach to play for autistic kids. She had the whole thing worked out: it was a structured play situation involving typical children and autistic children. The videos were nothing short of amazing --- and the groups looked like a good thing for the typical kids, too.
She very specifically focused on PLAY, not academic learning, and these groups did not take the place of school time (as I recall).
That makes all the sense in the world to me, because kids like mine are NOT going to be on grade level academically, not even close.
What they do need, desperately, is as much knowledge as possible of how to behave in the 'regular' world.
They need social and behavioral education & training, and a structured play group that facilitates that learning seems like heaven to me.
I stress that the play groups were structured: they were put together & overseen as a means to produce **genuine** play between typical kids and autistic children.
These were pretty severely autistic kids, too, not Aspergers children.
It was amazing.
I remember, too, reading a study years ago finding that regular-ed kids who were in full-inclusion classrooms had higher serotonin levels.
At the time, I perceived the situation as being causal: it was the experience of being in a class with disabled kids that increased the typical kids' serotonin.
(I can't remember, now, whether the kids' parents had volunteered their children for the class.)
That made lots of sense to me because of the research on social status and serotonin levels. (Serotonin rises in monkeys when their social status is artificially raised.)
Typical kids put in a full inclusion classroom could easily have their social status rise simply in relation to the fact that the challenged kids are 'lower' (which I think the typical kids are likely to feel is the case).
That study made me think that full inclusion should be a choice for everyone, including parents of the typical kids.
The potential benefits of full inclusion to typical kids could be explained to parents, and parents who saw those benefits as a good fit for their children could choose full inclusion while others could decline.
I do know that Ed's colleague had kids in a school where parents of typical kids could choose full inclusion versus homogeneously grouped classes. His colleague chose the full inclusion class and was very happy with her child's progress.
Choice has its challenges, but I prefer it to the alternatives.
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