Archive for Special Needs

When her son Dylan was just 6 years old, Kristen Wahlmeier noticed that he had to be bribed to read: A surfing trip here or a pair of new shoes there before he'd pick up a book. Worried as she watched him struggle, a gnawing fear crept into her stomach: Her only son, with big blue eyes and the jones for Star Wars, might be headed for a special education classroom.

Instead, teachers at his suburban Portland, Oregon, school intervened immediately, putting him into extra reading and vocabulary tutoring every day before school. It paid off. Now, officials in districts across the country are rapidly adopting similar early intervention programs, hoping that steering a child away from expensive special education classes later will pay off for them, too, in cost savings.

Not everyone is so pleased about the early help, known as “response to intervention” or RTI. Some parents worry that children with learning disabilities will have to wait too long to get the intensive help they need. Academics and administrators fear the trend is taking off too quickly, without enough research to back up its surge. Read more in this Associated Press story online.

Wesley Steele loves working with flowers and plants. That is all he ever wanted to do once he graduated from Newark High School and received vocational training. Today, he is living his dream, working in the garden center at Lowe’s near Newark, Delaware, in a position he has held since last April—before he finished school.

Finding a good job after high school used to be much more difficult for special-needs students such as Steele, because they would do a lot of preparation and then have to wait around for a job. But a statewide program called Early Start to Supported Employment helps smooth the move from school to the workplace.

The idea behind Early Start, which started as a pilot project three years ago and became standard procedure this school year, has been to get employable special-needs students involved in finding suitable jobs a year and a half before they turn 21 and leave their formal schooling behind. Read more in The News Journal online.

Graduating from high school is typically a moment of great joy for young people and their parents, but for students with disabilities it is sometimes described in dark terms. “It can feel like sinking into an abyss,” said Cathy Healy, the mother of an adult son with Down Syndrome, who recently completed his studies at an Alexandria, Virginia, high school.

During their public school years, children with disabilities are entitled to a menu of special services, such as music or occupational therapy, extra reading help and door-to-door transportation. Educators are legally required to prepare special-Ed kids for life after school under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. The law says that by the time students with disabilities are 16, schools are supposed to provide planning that may include more school, getting a job or trying to live independently.

The Education Department recently examined how well states have been implementing the special-Ed law and issued report cards to the states. Most received poor grades for their efforts to assist students with the transition out of high school. Read more in this article by The Associated Press.

 As Montgomery County, Maryland, 9th-grader Stephen Sabia reads “Romeo and Juliet” and studies the Holocaust and World War II for honors history and English, his mother credits an important ally in her years-long drive to secure the best education possible for her son with Down syndrome: the federal No Child Left Behind law.

The six-year-old law’s requirement to raise student achievement across the board has forced schools to pay attention as never before to special-needs children who too often had been written off as incapable of handling the same lessons as peers in mainstream classrooms. Students with disabilities have made some strides in math and reading on state and national tests in recent years, although experts debate whether the law is responsible. Read more in The Washington Post online.

Victoria Miresso cannot button a shirt, match a sock or tell one school bus from another. Yet at Roberto Clemente Middle School in Germantown, Maryland, 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.

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. Read more in The Washington Post online.

Twenty-eight full-time positions in the Columbia Public School District in Missouri are being looked at under a list of budget reduction considerations. The positions are being considered for termination in what are called the “Priority 1 cuts,” or $5.2 million in budget reductions that must be made in the school district no matter the fate of a 54-cent property tax levy on April 8.

Among the positions cut are eight literacy coaches and 12 positions in special education in middle schools that would be restructured to save the district $200,000. “Literacy coaches were included in the top-priority cuts because they were not intended to be permanent,” said school board President Karla DeSpain, “and it is hoped the program they established should be in place.”

Judith M. Dixon, a clinical psychologist by training and a sophisticated techie by avocation, is helping to lead the Library of Congress into the digital age. Dixon, 55, who gave up university teaching 27 years ago to join the library’s National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, is a key player on a team working to create a new generation of audiobooks for the library’s more than 700,000 registered blind and disabled users. The goal is to make the digital format the backbone of the library’s “talking book” program by transferring onto special digital flash drives the 60,000 titles that the library has on audiocassettes and giving patrons new machines on which to play them. Read more about the program in The Washington Post online.

Washington, DC, 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, the system would hire a private special-education school to run the program.

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. Read more about Rhee’s proposal in The Washngton Post online.

A federal appeals court has turned away a lawsuit by two Illinois school districts and four families that said the No Child Left Behind Act was in conflict with requirements of the main federal special education law.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, in Chicago, ruled unanimously on Monday, Feb. 11 that even if the NCLB law was at odds with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the special education law “must give way” because NCLB is the newer statute. Read more about the lawsuit in Education Week online.

School districts across the state will soon be ordered to stop providing special education services to home-schooled students, according to state Education Department officials who say the change is mandated by federal law. “Some parents are going to be very concerned about it,” Deputy Education Commissioner Rebecca Cort said January 14, 2008, after explaining the changes to the state Board of Regents. Because of revisions in 2004 to the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, public schools aren’t supposed to pay for services to students with disabilities whose parents choose to home-school them, according to an Education Department memo. The memo also says officials will soon notify districts of the change. Read more in The Times Union online.

The world of special education has lost one of its leading lights. Sally Smith, founder of the Lab School in Washington, DC, died this past weekend. She was 78. Smith started her school in 1967, a time when children with learning disabilities had nowhere to go. Smith created a school that influenced educators around the country. But her career in education started with one of her own children. Read about her innovative work in special education at NPR.org.

Every year, Roberta Valentine, an elementary school teacher in New York City, encounters a few students who cannot concentrate for more than a few moments. As a girl from her class once said, “Sometimes if I have to sit still for one more minute, I just can’t stand it.” A few years ago, Ms. Valentine read a book by Mel Levine, an expert on learning disabilities, about schoolchildren who have trouble focusing, and came across his term “mind trips” to describe such moments of distraction. She felt that it offered a clue about how to proceed. Read how she incorporated Levine’s ideas, writing assignments, and PowerPoint into her classroom to help her students focus in this article from The New York Times.

  State education organizations vowed earlier this week to continue using debate over reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act to remind federal legislators of some chronic concerns related to special education services—and to bring up some new ones. At a press briefing in Washington, representatives speaking on behalf of state lawmakers, special education directors, school administrators, and local school boards warned that the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act remains perennially underfunded, and that there is a continuing tension between the precepts of the federal special education law and the requirements of NCLB. Read more of this article from Education Week.

Often times, children are not identified at birth as having a disability, but rather exhibit more subtle issues between the ages of 3 and 5. With that in mind, the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD) has scheduled an online discussion, "Services Under IDEA for Your Preschool-age Child," for Monday, September 24, from noon to 1:00 p.m. Eastern time.

NCLD notes that the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) was created for children from birth to age 21. Luzanne Pierce, the author of NCLD's Parent Advocacy Brief Preschool Services Under IDEA, will share information and answer questions.

For further information or to submit an advance question, visit the following page on the NCLD website. No special equipment other than Internet access is needed to participate in this text-based discussion. A transcript will be posted shortly after the discussion.

The National Braille Press estimates that today only 12 percent of 55,000 legally blind children in the United States can read braille. Although the number does not account for those cognitively unable to read, the literacy rate is down significantly from 50 percent in the 1960s. It seems the time, effort, and money it takes to teach children braille is sometimes passed over in favor of less expensive and less time-consuming audio and computer aids. To many within the blind community, this trend holds serious ramifications. Read more of this article from The Christian Science Monitor.

Fifteen teen mothers who dropped out of secondary schools in Nigeria recently got the push they needed to put their lives back on track. Aiboste Secondary School, Auchi (ASSA), a community school, decided to take them back. School official Alhaja Monsurat Abdul-Salam said the gesture is necessary because of the escalating number of teenage mothers dropping out of school. “This trend, if not curbed, portends a high rate of illiteracy for this community,” she said. Their school fees and textbooks will be paid for with scholarship funds. Read the article at allAfrica.com.

There are 5 million illiterate people in Cameroon, according to Minister of Youth Affairs Adoum Garoua, who spoke June 27 during the official launching of the second phase of a literacy program for the blind in the Ekie neighborhood in Yaounde. The ceremony also marked the end of the seminar workshop for blind people in which some 30 participants (20 instructors and 10 sensitization agents) took part. The aim of the program is to reduce illiteracy among blind persons in Cameroon and make them independent. Of 600,000 registered blind people in Cameroon, only 1,000 can read or write, said Coco Bertin, president of the Club for Rehabilitated Blind Youths in Cameroon. Read the article at allAfrica.com.

An Obstacle to Overcome, a recent series by the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, examined dyslexia. Part one defined dyslexia and looked at how one family was struggling to help their dyslexic son. Part two examined the help that is available through learning centers, while part three looked at the training and education teachers need to deal with the reading disorder.

Hundreds of thousands of Texas children who struggle to read aren’t getting the help they’re entitled to because public schools are not following state law. Twenty-two years ago, Texas passed legislation requiring districts to identify and tutor students with dyslexia, a learning disability that affects 5 percent to 20 percent of all children. Today, however, schools still are failing to aggressively diagnose and remediate these children, leaving them to fall further behind academically, suffer emotionally and be at greater risk of dropping out of high school. Read more of this article from the Houston Chronicle.

Racing legend Sir Jackie Stewart said yesterday he hoped new teaching would help increase awareness of dyslexia and prevent sufferers “being left in the dustbin of life.” The three-time Formula One world champion was speaking at the launch in Edinburgh of a Scottish Executive-funded DVD, which is being sent to every school in Scotland. The DVD features Sir Jackie, who was not diagnosed as having the condition until the age of 41, speaking about how he struggled while at school. Read more of this article from The Herald.

Every day at Frankford Elementary School in Delaware, a group of students and teachers face a linguistic challenge—combining English, Spanish and American Sign Language into one cohesive unit. For students like second grader Andy Macedo, dealing with all three languages is a daily chore. Born deaf to a Hispanic family, Macedo is like several other local students attempting to discover their own form of communication. Read how the school is meeting this challenge in this article from The News Journal of Wilmington.

Missouri is grappling with a special education problem that may come as a surprise to educators elsewhere. Far from over-identifying a key group of minority students for such services, the state has found that it’s underserving such a group: English-language learners. Read more about the reluctance some Missouri educators exhibit in testing students for disabilities in this article from Education Week.

Like any parent, Marie Dunleavy wanted the best for her child but, when her first son, Daniel, was born with Down’s syndrome, she faced daily challenges. Finding herself frustrated that she couldn’t find any resources that focused on teaching children with learning disabilities to read, she decided to write her own. Through her own system Daniel, now 11, has a reading age of an older child without special needs. Specialists are finding the books help not only children with Down’s syndrome but also kids with Asperger’s and even dyslexia. Read more of this article from The Scotsman.

 The U.S. Department of Education has released final regulations to guide the creation of tests for students in special education who are capable of learning grade-level content, but not as quickly as their peers. The tests may allow some schools to make adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind Act when they had not before. Read more of this article from Education Week.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has published a two-part series on dyslexia. Part one looks at brain imaging and other research into dyslexia. Part two looks at how school districts accomodate students with dyslexia.

The National Accessible Reading Assessment Projects (NARAP), three projects that focus on designing accessible reading assessments for students with disabilities, have released two reports, one on defining reading proficiency for accessible large-scale assessments and a second on focus group reactions to three definitions of reading. NARAP is funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

Defining Reading Proficiency for Accessible Large-Scale Assessments: Some Guiding Principles and Issues identifies three principles for defining reading proficiency:

1. Definitions of reading proficiency must be consistent with core NCLB provisions.
2. Reading proficiency must be defined in such a way that flexible expressions of reading are allowed while preserving the essential nature of reading. This is crucial as we seek to make assessments accessible to students with a variety of disabilities.
3. Definitions of reading proficiency must reflect both comprehension and foundational skills.

For further information, visit the NARAP website.

 A report issued November 15 by the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy and the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community, both at Indiana University, outlines both the positive effects and the unintended consequences of the law. The report indicates that while efforts to meet NCLB accountability standards have improved short-term student outcomes, the act's narrow assessment criteria create pressure for schools to reverse inclusion efforts and may contribute to higher dropout rates among students with disabilities. For further information, read the news release about the study.

The approach is controversial among people with deafness who consider American Sign Language part of their culture. But a technique of teaching deaf students called "cued speech," which uses hand signals related to the sounds of English, seems to have the potential to raise literacy rates for deaf students.

Is learning American Sign Language before English more helpful for literacy development than an English-first approach? A conference sparks debate on the subject.

It may be expensive, but the Rawson-Saunders School in central Texas has a waiting list because of its small classes and specialized interventions for students with dyslexia.

Parents of dyslexic children in Ireland are pooling their resources to make up for the Government’s failure to provide adequately for their children’s educational needs, a failure that many feel is tantamount to a criminal offence. Read more in Western People (Ireland).

Some visually impaired students in Rhode Island lack support materials that would help their literacy development, according to a recent report.

Campaigners for disabled children are complaining about a “distorted” view of inclusive education in England. Get details in this article from BBC News.

Education correspondent Mike Baker believes that special education in Great Britain “may be at a turning point: after almost 30 years of movement [toward the inclusion of special needs pupils in mainstream classrooms], the pendulum could be about to swing back from inclusion towards segregation.” Read Baker’s column at the BBC News website.