Two weeks ago I met with my youngest son's teacher and a couple of other personnel in order to decide his fate for the coming year. For those of you who are familiar with the special-needs parlance, it was his annual ISP (Individual Service Plan) meeting. The meeting that will determine how much therapy he gets, what the years goals are, and essentially how much attention he'll get over the next year. And yes, it's almost impossible to imagine where a four-year-old will
be in a year in terms of his abilities. So the uselessness quotient of
the ISP has not escaped me.
However, it came up in discussions, now that he's getting bigger, where he might be headed in the future: mainstream school? A special-needs classroom? Which is better? And how do you know? It turns out there's no easy answer, and many parents say that the mainstreaming of the past has done more harm than good.
As of 2005, more than half of kids with special needs were considered "fully included", which means spending at least 80% of their day in a "typical" classroom. My 2nd grader can attest to this, as kids are coming and going from her classroom into various therapies all day long. And while the concept of inclusion is wonderful on an idealistic social-acceptance basis, it may leave kids bereft of services they truly need. Many kids may benefit more from the individualized attention they'd receive in a special-needs classroom rather than being one-in-thirty in a class of typical kids.
Not only that, but special-needs kids may be left to their own devices socially as well. Kids sort one another out pretty quickly. My older son spent 5 years with a classmate with Down syndrome, and year after year he'd report that most of the kids simply ignored her much of the time. And this was in a Waldorf school where, frankly, I expected more from the kids (including my own). I can imagine other kids treating my own kid with Down syndrome much the same; after all, he truly is quite different from other kids his age and that difference is noticeable to everyone (maybe even to him).
But more and more kids with special needs are finding themselves in typical classroom, and, no surprise, a lot of this comes down to economics. It costs far less to have a kid in a mainstream classroom, with maybe a couple of hours a week with various therapists, than it does for him to be in a special-needs classroom 100% of the time with a full-time teacher and likely a number of assistants. And cash-strapped school districts are cutting back in every way they can.
While it's heartbreaking thinking that your kid faces a lifetime of being apart, it may simply be reality. My son is different from other kids, and nothing save excising his extra chromosome is going to make that go away, and as sad as it is to accept a lifetime of difference, sometimes it's for the best.
