When education is federally mandated for all, then every
student has to be accommodated within the school system. No longer can school
education mean merely academics. Schools have to create a continuum of
services, ranging from most restrictive to least restrictive, from
self-contained to full inclusion. The most restrictive self-contained classrooms
would still try to have their students interact with their typically developing
peers in some non-academic settings.
Education
is federally mandated and a universal right. Every taxpayer is eligible to free
and appropriate public education.
This arrangement of
classes is born from the word- appropriate. It means every student has to be appropriately placed and educated.
To enable appropriate
placement, a continuum of services needs to be offered. Practical considerations
create the need for coming up with some plan to accommodate all students- not just academic students. Every student has to be
fit in somewhere....
The continuum goes
from fully self-contained classrooms with minimal interaction with typically
developing peers at least during lunch (or, typically developing students could
volunteer in such classrooms as community service) to fully integrated
programs, where support is offered by the special education department inside
the regular classroom. Ancillary services such as speech and Language, OT,
Braille, etc, etc are offered in self-contained classes in what is called a
pull-out setting for a part of the day. When students are in the mainstream
classes with paraeducator support, that is called push-in support. Most of my
students have a combination of both. We specify in their IEPs how much of the
day they will be pulled out and how much they will be pushed-in. The same is
true of life skills classes. Students who are very good at Math or science,
etc, are integrated for that; yet go to life skills classes for social
pragmatics, etc... The continuum goes on to include services for students in
prison/reformatory and for chronically sick students in hospital. Teachers and
paraeducators go to hospitals after the regular school day to tutor sick kids. The
continuum also includes homeschooling. In short, the law states that EVERY
student needs to be accommodated.
Continuum of Services
School site services:
- Self-contained
(usually life skills classes)
- Push-in Inclusion (academic
classes with paraeducator support in their areas of strength)
- Pull-out ancillary
services (Speech and Language, OT, sign language, braille, social
group/pragmatics, etc)
No hard line separates
these categories. Students are interchangeably placed for part of each day in
each kind of class. As students mature and progress, their percentage of
participation in inclusion increases...
Off-site services:
- Home-schooling
- Reform school
- On-site education
for kids in hospital
Interaction with typically
developing peers is encouraged during lunch time, physical education classes,
or typically developing students work in the life skills classes. The life
skills class in our school makes, packs and sells popcorn to the whole school
on ‘popcorn Fridays’, they make and sell Christmas presents (they use these
funds for field trips and for cooking supplies). They set up and man stalls to
sell these things. They work with real money, make change, etc... They also run
office errands, deliver office mail to teachers (this is their Geography
activity, reading a school map to find different classrooms) and serve lunch in
the lunch line. They clean the cafeteria after lunch, etc. They are integrated
into the school community and a common presence all around the school.
An
academic program would imply some inclusion (also increasing levels of
inclusion over time) in a formal academic classroom setting. Life skills
students also study academics- basic Math and literacy- but they study these in
a self-contained class. It is a modified curriculum and taught at a much slower
pace. But this level of academics wouldn't qualify as inclusion in an academic
class, since it is taught in a separate setting.
Another yardstick to
differentiate between life skills academics and 'academic' academics is to see
who is teaching the course. Life skills academics are taught by special
education teachers to a homogenous group of students with special needs;
academic academics are taught by general education teachers who have the right
subject credentials.
It's only academic
inclusion if a student is in a general education class taught by a mainstream
teacher, and the class is a heterogeneous mix of typically developing students
and students with special needs. It would be a scenario where students with
special needs are exposed to the same curriculum as all, and are expected to
meet the same standards of performance- with the help of accommodations,
modifications, scaffolding, and support, of course.
I would love to see
Indian schools offer life skills classes, academic inclusion and the ancillary
services necessary for academic success on all school sites. It would be
wonderful to see students with special needs become a part of the education
community. It benefits all students, not just students with special needs.
Typically developing students who routinely interact, or simply just meet
students with special needs around campus, take such inclusion for granted, and
grow up with a better understanding of such students’ capabilities. While there
is no accounting for prejudice, there might be fewer pilots who make people
with special needs disembark from flights in the future…
