Sunday, June 3, 2001
Education For All
By court order, Hawaii is finally
making good on its pledge to educate
children who need special care because
of learning, mental or physical disabilities.
Providing for these needs is a complicated,
expensive and divisive process...and the
costs in time, money and frustration
are here to stay.
ILLUSTRATION BY KIP AOKI
Story by Lee Catterall
Star-BulletinA QUARTER CENTURY of effort to provide what the courts have ordered to be a "free and appropriate public education" to handicapped children has been called a great success, but the costs have stunned politicians and school administrators and have bewildered taxpayers.
The controversy has been low on the national barometer of hot-button issues, forced instead upon local school boards that have had to increase property taxes to meet demands from scores if not hundreds of lawsuits. The issue has been magnified in Hawaii by a class-action suit that affects the entire state because of its single school district supported mainly by general tax revenues.
As next year's authorization of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, approaches, the issue finally has arrived on the national stage. It was cited as a partial cause of last month's political earthquake that resulted in Democrats gaining control of the U.S. Senate.
Hawaii's Department of Education has gone from "a totally minimalistic approach" to the point today that "overwhelmingly the bulk of kids are getting the kind of services that the federal laws contemplate," said Eric Seitz, an attorney for Frankie Servetti-Coleman, whose 1993 class-action lawsuit on behalf of her daughter, Jennifer Felix, seemed at times to have brought the department to its knees.
THE PROBLEM IN HAWAII, said Paul LeMahieu, the superintendent of schools, is that the Department of Education waited to address the problem until forced to do so by the Felix lawsuit. At that time, only 4.2 percent of Hawaii school children had been designated as in need of "special" education, compared with percentages of 11.5 to 12.5 in mainland schools. Even after that, he said, for three years the Hawaii schools "lacked a coherent, consistent vision and direction" in assembling a program to address the needs of disabled children.
"I think we're working very hard," said Debra Farmer, the department's current administrator of special education. "We have some areas that we still have to work harder in, like retention and recruitment" of teachers adept at helping children with physical or behavioral disabilities.
The demands will not evaporate with any future ruling from U.S. District Judge David Ezra that the state has complied with a decree in which it consented to abide by certain standards. Similar decrees on a smaller, local scale are in force across the country.
Those decrees are based on standards written into law in 1975 with enactment of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, after federal courts ruled that public schools must accommodate all handicapped and emotionally disturbed children. The law was renamed IDEA in 1990 and broadened the following year.
Disabilities covered by IDEA now encompass 13 categories ranging from physical handicaps to stuttering, autism and attention deficit disorder to severe emotional disturbance. More than half of the children covered under the law are described as having learning disabilities.The number of children provided protection under the law has mushroomed, and the cost per pupil has risen at an even greater pace.
Before the law's enactment, about 1.7 million handicapped children were denied access to public schools and 2.5 million were enrolled in institutions offering substandard education. Today, 6.3 million disabled students aged 3 to 21 receive free public educations -- about 8.2 percent of the nation's public school students.
IN HAWAII, MORE than 23,000 of the public schools' 184,000 students, or 12.2 percent, are designated as disabled. Of those, 11,000 are under the umbrella of the Felix decree, guaranteed mental-health services that have been provided in recent years by the state Department of Health.
Beginning July 1, about 7,000 of the children covered by the Felix decree -- those with less severe disabilities -- will begin receiving those services from the Department of Education. The number of psychologists in schools will rise from seven to 72, but they also will be available to regular education students.
"We're building something called a comprehensive student support system, and special ed is nested in it," LeMahieu said. "Not everyone needs all of it, not everyone needs it all the time, but there are times when just about anybody will need it, and anybody who thinks differently wasn't in any of our schools in the two weeks following the Xerox tragedy, when we dispatched professionals to help kids deal with what had happened."
The percentage of school funding spent on general education nationwide plummeted from 80.1 percent in 1967 to 56.8 percent in 1996, while the percentage going to special education for the disabled zoomed from 3.6 percent to 19 percent, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.
LEMAHIEU SAID special education now accounts for 28 percent to 30 percent of education budgets nationally. In Hawaii's last school year, 66.8 percent of instructional funding went to general education, 21.5 percent to special education. He says the latter figure will rise to 23 percent in the coming school year, about $213 million.
Judith E. Heumann, assistant secretary for special education in the Clinton administration, said part of the reason for the influx may be that teachers are seeking help in crowded classrooms, and designating a struggling child as having a learning disability may be the only way to get it.
"If a kid isn't a good reader by the age of 6, they hang a special-ed label on him to get him individual help," said Bruce Hunter, director of public policy for the American Association of School Administrators. "Unfortunately, almost no special-ed teacher knows how to teach reading."
That phenomenon has created a backlash in some quarters. In Greenwich, Conn., one of every five high school students was classified as disabled three years ago, causing the town's school board to take action. Reforming the program resulted in a decline of the special education population to 13 percent, a level that the school district can handle.
"I'm sure that's happening," Seitz said of teachers and even parents seeking help for children through special education, "but when we do audits and when independent people come in and audit to determine if certain kids aren't entitled to be served under the federal guidelines, nobody is telling us that we're serving kids who aren't entitled to those services. The guidelines for services are based upon federal regulations."
"Whatever the reason," Farmer added, "if the kids need help, we should be identifying them. To me it doesn't matter if it's motivated by the teacher or the parents. If the child truly has a disability, we should be identifying them and giving them whatever help the child needs."
The competition for attention -- and costly services -- has caused divisiveness between interests of special education and of regular education, and in some areas a backlash against special education for taking money away from the general school program.
"To date," responded Lemahieu, "we have not shifted as much as one dollar, not so much as one penny, from regular education to special education. We haven't done that and we won't do that. I will not contribute to the divisiveness between the special-ed and the regular-ed communities. I think it's a fragile situation at best, and I think the divisiveness doesn't serve either community well."
However, he acknowledged that increases in the education budget have gone disproportionately to special rather than regular education. In the last biennium, $28 million of the $31 million in new monies that entered the system each year went to special education.
Adding to the scramble for attention -- and dollars -- has been the federal government's small contribution to special education.
When the 1975 legislation was enacted, Congress pledged to pay for 40 percent of the cost of special education. It has never come close, averaging only 13 percent. In Hawaii, the federal share is 8 percent and has never exceeded 12 percent.
The federal share has become an issue in Washington with the pending authorization of IDEA. The White House issued a statement that a Senate measure providing the full 40 percent funding would increase spending for special education "far in excess of the president's budget for the next 10 years, with no attention to improving educational results for these children."
DISAGREEMENT about the funding of special education played a large role in Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont, a cosponsor of the amendment, bolting the Republican Party and becoming an independent, giving Democrats control of the Senate when he agreed to vote with them on electing leaders and organizing committees.
In announcing his decision, Jeffords cited his disagreement with Bush "on very fundamental issues. The largest for me is education." Jeffords has pushed hard for years for significant increases in special education spending.
Competition for dollars is not the only issue. Critics also have called for changes to make special education more efficient, with an emphasis on early identification of and services for children with learning problems that will enable them to rise out of special education programs in their later school years.
Last month, a joint report by the Progressive Policy Institute, affiliated with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a conservative think tank, said that special education suffers from "mission creep," a Pentagon phrase describing a targeted undertaking that expands until its goals become unattainable.
Special education, the report says, "attempts to serve an ever-growing population of youngsters with an ever-lengthening list of problems and difficulties, some of them ambiguous in origin, subjective in identification and uncertain as to solution."
WHILE PRAISING the accomplishments of special education programs thus far, the report says they have "far too many categories," especially in the area of learning disabilities, and are "too vague about which children need this assistance."
LeMahieu and Farmer said the Hawaii schools are making a concerted effort at early identification of children's disabilities, and Seitz, the Felix attorney, praises that effort.
"One of the best and most successful programs in Hawaii has been the zero to 3 program, which identifies kids who are potential (special education) class members at an early stage and offers them assistance whenever there is any indication that there are delays in the development," Seitz said.
"There were times when those programs were threatened with being cut back, and we resisted that," he added. "As a consequence, I think that we do as good a job of diagnosing and intervening at an early stage as any place in the country."
LeMahieu said improvement in identifying disabilities in children at an early age could cause the population of special education children to level off or even decline, although "there's not a strong empirical record to validate it."
Instead, he expects special education will remain at the same level, as will the costs. "They are and will plateau, and in some instances some portions of them will come back down, because some of those costs are non-recurring start-up costs," LeMahieu said.
"It is the way schools will be forever, in the sense that our responsibility is to build a system that sustains and endures, and keep the system in place forever," he said.
