NH sees greater need for special ed services -I wonder why!

Saturday, November 28, 2009
By SARAH PALERMO Keene Sentinel

AMANDA BOROZINSKI / Sentinel Staff Teacher Allison A. Carr reads a book to her class in the Symonds School learning center in Keene. She is working with the students on vocabulary and story structure. Enlarge


AMANDA BOROZINSKI / Sentinel Staff Using dice, Jonathan Durrant works on adding two numbers. Using her hands, teacher Nancy Elliott demonstrates how to count the sum of the dice. Last year in the Granite State, 13.8 percent of students needed special education services. . Enlarge

AMANDA BOROZINSKI / Sentinel Staff Teacher Allison A. Carr reads a book to her class in the Symonds School learning center in Keene. She is working with the students on vocabulary and story structure.
Enlarge

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of a three-day package by the Keene Sentinel about special education in the state’s southwestern corner.

Peek into the big room off the main hallway in Symonds Elementary School in Keene.

Two beanbag chairs slouch in one corner, ready for quiet reading time. Someone drew wild circles on the paper tacked to the easel in the middle of the room.

This is Symonds’ learning center. Every elementary school in Keene has a learning center; it’s where students with special educational needs work in small groups with teachers such as Allison A. Carr and Nancy A. Elliott.

Roughly one in five students in the Keene School District receives special education services, slightly more than the national average, which has steadily grown since special education became law in 1975.

Some students’ reading troubles might leave them bewildered and overwhelmed in a large class.

One of Carr’s students needs a squishy rubber cushion on his seat during reading time, so he can fidget by shifting his weight, without moving his whole body around and disrupting the other students. Another has a ball to hold and squeeze under the table, to keep his hands busy so they don’t wander and cause distractions.

What unique services these students need in order to learn is something Carr, Elliott and other special education teachers try to work out over time.

Why these children are part of a growing population is a more complicated question. Education officials have theories, but are quick to point out that they don’t know for certain.

Changing diagnosis dynamic

In 1975, the federal government passed the first special-education law, which would eventually become the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

At the time, most people assumed it would affect only the most dramatically disabled children, the ones living in state institutions or kept home their entire lives.

The first year students with disabilities were included in public schools, they represented about 8 percent of the nation’s school population.

That increased to 10 percent by 1980, 11 percent by 1990 and 13.6 percent by 2006 – an increase of nearly 3 million special education students over 35 years.

Last year in the Granite State, 13.8 percent of students needed special education services like those provided in the Symonds learning center, one of several in the district. That’s up from 12.9 percent in 2000.

Between 17 and 20 percent of students in the Keene School District receive special education services. On the first day of school, 776 of the district’s 3,700 students received some kind of special education services, according to Reeves.

It’s not that the laws or regulations are rewritten every time a new disorder is identified.

Conditions such as Attention Deficit Disorder, autism and emotional problems have always been covered under the law.

Schools have also always been required to provide related services – things like speech and language therapy, occupational therapy and physical therapy – to help kids meet their educational goals.

“What’s changed is society’s attitude toward disabilities, and the school’s ability to pinpoint a problem,” said Catherine L. Reeves, director of special education for New Hampshire School Administrative Unit 29, which serves Keene, Chesterfield, Harrisville, Marlow, Marlborough, Nelson and Westmoreland school districts.

A better understanding

The past three decades have brought a “broadening and clarifying of definitions” of student disabilities, Reeves said. And as evaluations have improved, she said, “we know more and we are better able to diagnose disabilities.”

In the past, learning disabilities were often diagnosed based on statistical discrepancies. Students were given tests in isolated, quiet rooms, and if they scored within a certain range, they were diagnosed with a certain disability.

Under those conditions, kids fell through the cracks, Reeves said.

For starters, children usually perform better during formal testing, where they’re one-on-one with the tester in a distraction-free room, than they perform in the everyday classroom, Reeves said.

“So, students who have problems in a regular classroom were performing just well enough (in the testing situations) to disqualify themselves for services. The process didn’t take into account their actual performance in the classroom.”

If students scored too high on the test, educators were unable to provide services to them, even though they obviously needed help, she said.

Evaluations today take into account whether a child can learn in a classroom setting, or whether there’s something holding him or her back.

Tests are still administered, and precautions are taken to be sure the problem isn’t just a situation, like being bullied.

Other factors can influence the numbers of students needing services, and some start years before the students set foot in a classroom or an evaluator’s office.

The United States’ infant mortality rate has fallen dramatically over the past several decades, from 26 per 1,000 live births in 1960 to 6.9 per 1,000 in 2005, the most recent year for which statistics are available.

“A decreasing infant mortality rate means many things,” Reeves said. “It means mothers are receiving better prenatal care and giving birth in cleaner facilities than in centuries past. It also means more disabled babies are surviving when in the past, they might not have lived more than a few hours or days.”

Dr. Geraldine Rubin, chairman of the pediatrics department at Cheshire Medical Center/Dartmouth-Hitchcock Keene, agrees.

Some infants, especially those born months early, wouldn’t have survived if they were born a generation ago, she said. Today, they eventually show up at preschool.

Beyond the classroom

Increased awareness of disabilities makes parents and teachers more likely to refer a child for evaluation, experts say.

“Once you develop clinical language and it becomes part of the culture, then you’re going to start to see more and more of it,” said MacLean Gander, a professor and former vice president at Landmark College.

Landmark, founded in the early 1980s in Putney, Vt., bills itself partly as the “premier college for students with learning disabilities.”

Today more than ever, parents are alert to the possibility that their child’s fidgeting, poor concentration and low grades might not be the results of laziness or a lack of motivation, but symptoms of a neurological, developmental or emotional disability, Gander said.

In years past, a learning-disabled student might have been yelled at and disciplined until he dropped out of school. Today, he might have one session a day in the learning center, or with a counselor.

Emotional or behavioral counseling is, to some, unrelated to education. Behavioral problems should be treated at home, they say. But it’s a special education service that’s been part of the law for 35 years.

A federal measure passed in 1975 required each state to establish guidelines for public school special education.

Previously, New Hampshire’s special education law said schools had to help students with “serious” emotional disturbances. Today, the law includes all children with emotional difficulties that impede their ability to learn.

The new language doesn’t change the eligibility criteria, though.

The emotional problem in question still needs to be severe enough to interrupt a child’s education. He or she still follows the multi-step eligibility process before an “individual education plan” is written and services are provided on a regular basis.

Keene Co-Superintendent William B. Gurney remembers being in school and seeing students who misbehaved being sent to the principal’s office time after time for disrupting class.

Some of those students found school so alienating they dropped out as soon as possible. Now that New Hampshire state law says students must stay in school until they’re 18, leaving isn’t an option.

Today, parents and school officials know better how to apply the protections of special education laws to all students who are entitled to them.

“Kids with a behavioral problem were marginalized. Now the understanding is these kids should have an equal chance to be productive members of society and if it’s a matter of us giving them more services, that’s what we owe them,” he said.

“We only have them 6 hours a day, but we have a responsibility to keep them safe in an environment to learn to the best of their potential. Hopefully we’re doing it.”

Finally, there’s the effect of the recession. Stress outside the classroom – Did she get a good breakfast? Does she have warm, clean clothes today? How was the morning bus ride? – can be enough to tip a young child’s emotional state from “ready to learn” to “shutdown mode.”

More and more kids are at that tipping point this year, said Elliott, one of Symonds’ special education teachers.

http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/news/456196-227/nh-sees-greater-need-for-special-ed.html