Continuum of Services

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…