As I mentioned in my intro post about the IDEA, Back to Basics: Special Education, one of the fundamental goals of the IDEA is to eliminate the "separate but equal" status of children with special needs. Before the IDEA, kids with special needs were not only often in the trailer on the edge of the school campus, there were in a trailer no where near their home school campus.
Many, many parent advocates work tirelessly to promote inclusion. In the terms of the IDEA, each child must be educated in the "least restrictive environment" appropriate for that child. Ideally, this would be a general education classroom for all kids. Now, the IDEA doesn't assume that all kids are going to thrive in a traditional classroom by being simply placed there. Each IEP must consider appropriate supports and related services that can enable that child to succeed in the general ed classroom - not just be placed there. These supplemental aids and services can include anything from nursing assistance, psychological therapy, and transportation. They also include assistive technologies (as you know, a subject near and dear to my heart) such as AACs, PECS, LiveScribe pens, etc.
This is how the IDEA is supposed to work. As you might imagine, despite great strides towards inclusion, there is some disagreement in the disability community as to what is actually best for the child.
Case in point: Boy (around age 5) with autism is placed in a general education classroom. Written into his IEP is the assistance of a paraprofessional for 8 hours a week, plus OT, SLP, and special ed services. The nature of the boy's autism is such that he struggles greatly with social cues, social modeling, play, and relating to peers (among other issues). The parents soon realize that this placement isn't working: the paraprofessionals are consumed with other, more disruptive children; because the boy doesn't model from typical peers, he isn't learning social cues; and because there are so many kids in the classroom, he is often lost in his own world, not engaging with anything or anyone.
Parents seek other options, and find a specialized program for kids with autism in another school. This is a 4:1:1 classroom, with only kids on the autism spectrum, and a greater emphasis on behavioral techniques to drill appropriate skills. This school is 30 minutes away (not the home school). Nevertheless, this is the school the parents feel is best. It's probably not the LRE for this boy, but what are the parents to do? Their home school was failing their son.
Civil right advocates tend to argue that in order to create change, one must fight the systems that are failing to provide legally mandated civil rights. Many parent attorneys and advocates would say that inclusion in a general ed classroom for all kids with special needs - whatever those needs are - is as fundamental a civil rights issue as the integration of school by race prompted by Brown v. Board of Ed. It is an absolute necessity.
Yet many parents just aren't up for this battle. It seems like a pipe dream for every single child to be placed in a general ed classroom. What about kids with severe behavioral issues? What about kids who are medically fragile and would miss more school than they could attend, because the exposure to so many kids (and germs) would make them ill.
This is why school change is so slow. Parents are continually weighing what is best for their own child, right now, with whether or not it's worth making a fuss, versus trying to effectuate real change in their local schools. Plus, inclusion is hard work - creating individualized plans for each student is a lot harder than creating just one lesson plan. Successful inclusion is not the same as mere placement. Happily, we can take big steps forward in the project by looking to universal design for learning principles, and the examples of schools across the country that really have made inclusion work.
But as to whether total inclusion is a reasonable goal? I'm just not sure.
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