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Like most children, all I wanted was to be like everyone else. My brother
and my friends went to our neighborhood public school in Denver.
I couldn’t.
I had to go to a “special school” for children with disabilities called the
Boettcher School. To me, there was nothing “special” about it. I knew I
didn’t belong there. I had a mind, even if my body didn’t allow me to walk.
I could learn like any other child and so could a lot of my friends who went
to Boettcher and didn’t belong there. But that’s the way it was for children
with disabilities before 1975, when federal legislation mandated a free and
appropriate public education for all children with disabilities regardless
of the nature or severity of the child’s disability. Children were either
put in special schools like Boettcher or hidden away in special education
classrooms in the regular public schools, never to be seen by “normal”
students. Even after the law was passed, I waited four years before the
Denver Public Schools allowed me to be mainstreamed into a regular public
school.
A lot has changed for children with disabilities since I graduated 21 years
ago from Thomas Jefferson High School in Denver. A recent visit to my
nephew’ s school, Kaiser Elementary in Denver, showed me that. It strongly
re-affirmed to me that inclusion of children with disabilities in the
regular classroom not only works, but benefits both the disabled child and
the children without disabilities.
My nephew, A.J., was born with cerebral palsy, a medical condition affecting
control of the muscles caused by an injury to the brain before or during
birth. A.J.’s brain injury was caused by food poisoning. A.J.’s challenges
are far greater than those I had to deal with going to school. As I do, A.J.
uses a wheelchair. His motor skills are not yet developed enough for him to
use an electric wheelchair, so he has to be pushed around school in a manual
chair. Except for a few simple words, A.J. can’t speak. He uses an
electronic talker to communicate. His mind wanders, making it hard for him
to concentrate on specific tasks. He deals with both physical and
developmental challenges in school that I never faced. Fortunately, he has
the tools available to him to meet those challenges much more easily than
children with disabilities did when I went to school.
He arrives each day at school with his mother, Judy, who works at the school
as a paraprofessional, helping A.J. and other students with disabilities who
need help in the classroom or in the bathroom. A.J. spends part of the day
in the regular education classroom and part of the day in a special
education classroom. Part of his time each week also is spent with physical
and occupational therapists who try to help him learn. Susan Brown is A.J’s
occupational therapist at the school. She has been with the Denver Public
Schools for 15 years and helps children at four different schools in the
district. “We are trying to help him to show us his best educationally,”
Brown said. “A child that is nonverbal, we are trying to get him more verbal
as time goes on. You have to make people understand that he is able to
problem solve and do things.”
His homeroom teacher is Jeff Goldenberg, who has taught first grade at the
school for the past three years. Goldenberg works hard to help A.J. and
other special education students interact with the children in the classroom
and vice-versa. “I think he blends in after awhile,” Goldenberg said. “At
the beginning, they had a lot of questions about his wheelchair; they had a
lot of questions about his talker. Just how he did things. Now, he is just
one of the kids, and that is what I hoped for.” The kids seem undaunted by
A.J. and the other special education children in the classroom. His
classmates not only interact with A.J., but they also readily volunteer to
help him when they can.
Goldenberg plays the guitar and sings to help the children learn to interact
with each other. During one song, he encourages the children to dance. As
A.J. stands with the help of his mother to join in, four classmates gather
around and dance with A.J. “They get to interact with him every day, and
they realize he is a regular kid like they are,” Goldenberg said. “I think
that is huge.” His special education teacher, Marilyn Walter, concentrates
on A.J.’s individual needs. Part of his time with Walter is spent helping
A.J. work on pronouncing the sounds of letters. “Communication. That has
been my goal with him all year,” Walter said. “He is doing much better with
it, but he is still not where I would like him to be.” When she’s with the
entire special education class in the afternoon, Walter is working with the
children on exercises in educational kinesiology that help stimulate brain
activity. She calls one exercise “brain buttons.” Children press on either
side of their sternum and at the same time press on their belly button for
centering, helping increase the flow of blood to the brain. “The more we get
the brain ready to work, the more we can get it to work optimally,” Walter
said. “Then the child will learn much more efficiently, faster.”
The time spent in the special education classroom helps A.J. meet his
educational goals, but Walter knows A.J.’s time in the regular classroom is
just as important in his development. As Walter points out, special
education children are “going to be in the general life setting,” so it is
important for them to be with their non-disabled peers. “And children who
are not in special ed are going to be working with children who were in
special ed,” Walter said. “So it works both ways. So I think it is really
good to have everybody integrated together.”
The school does have challenges meeting A.J.’s needs. Money is tight, so
buying the equipment A.J. needs is difficult. His talker is on loan to the
school and will eventually have to be returned. The school can’t afford the
$7,000 to purchase one, and insurance won’t cover the cost, so A.J.’s
parents will have to find funding to buy one or purchase one themselves.
Still, the school provides A.J. the best learning environment it can,
understanding that it can be done without disrupting the education of other
children in his class.
Attending my 20th high school reunion last summer and talking with my former
classmates reminded me of the difficulties everyone wrongly assumed I would
face in a regular classroom. Not only did my classmates accept me as one of
their own, but my presence didn’t affect their education or harm their
future.
I’m sure one day A.J.’s class will look at him in the same way.
Reprinted with permission from the
Beach Center on
Disability
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School systems are responsible for assuring that transition planning becomes
a component of the IEP beginning at age 14; however, it may be necessary to
start transition planning much earlier in order to allow the student to
achieve meaningful post-school outcomes. (From the Georgia Department of
Education's Transition Manual) Read more about the topic in the
Roadmap
Transition section. |
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