Now showing signs of progress, CCSD is publicizing the phasing in of a five-year plan to redistribute special needs children to their "home" schools. However, according to a recent P & C article, "The law doesn't require students with disabilities to be educated at their home school, but district officials are going beyond what's mandated to try to make that happen."In fact, district officials are carefully phasing in mandates required by IDEA 2004--that's the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1997 as amended in 2004.
What the Act actually mandates is the following:
"The Department [of Education] has consistently maintained that a child with a disability should be educated in a school as close to the child's home as possible, unless the services identified in the child's IEP require a different location. Even though the Act does not mandate that a child with a disability be educated in the school he or she would normally attend if not disabled, section 612(a)(5)(A) of the Act presumes that the first placement option considered for each child with a disability is the regular classroom in the school that the child would attend if not disabled, with appropriate supplementary aids and services to facilitate such placement. Thus, before a child with a disability can be placed outside of the regular educational environment, the full range of supplementary aids and services that could be provided to facilitate the child's placement in the regular classroom setting must be considered. Following that consideration, if a determination is made that a particular child with a disability cannot be educated satisfactorily in the regular educational environment, even with the provision of appropriate supplementary aids and services, that child could be placed in a setting other than the regular classroom.
"Although the Act does not require that each school building in an LEA be able to provide all the special education and related services for all types and severities of disabilities, the LEA has an obligation to make available a full continuum of alternative placement options that maximize opportunities for its children with disabilities to be educated with nondisabled peers to the extent appropriate. In all cases, placement decisions must be individually determined on the basis of each child's abilities and needs and each child's IEP, and not solely on factors such as category of disability, severity of disability, availability of special education and related services, configuration of the service delivery system, availability of space, or administrative convenience. "
Now, this law requires major reconfiguration of CCSD's special education programs--and who would complain about that? Judging from the statements by Connie Mathis, CCSD's executive director of special education, the District is edging carefully into compliance, with the first 100 students placed in home schools to be those with the least disabilities. However, nothing in the article indicates that CCSD is "going beyond what's mandated," and I suspect Mathis did not say that it is.
It would be nice to think that CCSD would go beyond mandates out of the goodness of its heart, but such isn't the case. Instead, let's commend it on its careful plan to make sure that the inclusion of these special students in the general classroom works to the benefit of all.
I'll now horrify some of you by quoting President Bush, whose No Child Left Behind Act is also impacting special education:
"America's schools educate over 6 million children with disabilities. In the past, those students were too often just shuffled through the system with little expectation that they could make significant progress or succeed like their fellow classmates. Children with disabilities deserve high hopes, high expectations, and extra help. . . . We're applying the reforms of the No Child Left Behind Act to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act so schools are accountable for teaching every single child."
It's not only students with disabilities who have been "just shuffled through the system with little expectation." Let's hope this new attitude carries over to other aspects of CCSD.
Posts
