Sitting alone outside the principal’s office in Bridgeport’s Holden Elementary School, Michael Holt squirms in his tiny chair.
Once again, the mentally disabled 8-year-old has been sent out of class for bothering other children. And once again, Michael has no idea what he did wrong.
“I didn’t start the fight,” he says.
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He tugs his bulky winter coat around his shoulders and brushes back his straight brown hair.
“Soon I calm down,” he says.
Chicago Board of Education officials want to put Michael into a regular 1st-grade classroom where he will be taught alongside his non-disabled peers, according to Holden Principal Terri Katsulis and Michael’s parents.
This is called “mainstreaming” and is at the heart of the formidable question of what to do with Illinois’ growing population of emotionally disabled children.
As a transitional step, Katsulis said, officials have assigned the boy to one of 143 “cross-categorical” classrooms where children with a variety of mental disabilities are taught together instead of a small class exclusively for kids like Michael, who have behavioral disorders.
But even in the transitional class, Michael’s sudden mood swings make it nearly impossible for him or other children to learn. Nobody, it seems, is benefiting.
“It really means more stress for the teacher, less individual attention for Mike. It’s the other kids who will feel the brunt of it,” Katsulis said.
For better or worse, officials in Illinois and nationwide have decided that mainstreaming disabled children is the solution to two chronic problems: dwindling school budgets and discrimination against the disabled.
Last year, some 3,500 disabled Chicago pupils were transferred out of separate special education programs and moved back to their neighborhood schools. Another 1,500 to 2,000 are expected to be relocated this year.
These students will continue to receive some special education services, but the ultimate goal is to put as many disabled students as possible in regular classrooms, school board officials say in records and interviews.
Special education classes can cost more than twice as much as regular classes. And few would dispute that physically handicapped children can be taught alongside non-disabled peers, the philosophical tenet behind the mainstreaming movement.
But the issues are not that simple.
Only about 7 percent of Chicago’s 46,000 special education students have physical disabilities.
About 15 percent have language and communications problems. The rest, about 78 percent, have cognitive and emotional handicaps, most of them fueled by the confounding effects of domestic violence, drug abuse, neglect, poverty and other social ills that leave them unable to pay attention, stick with schoolwork, or control violent urges. Their behavior is so unpredictable and bewildering that therapists often can’t agree on a diagnosis.
Many parents, far from arguing that their children are being discriminated against by being kept in special education classrooms, are desperately trying to keep their kids there.
Virtually everyone agrees that for mainstreaming to work, mentally disabled students need additional counselors, psychologists and teachers.
Board officials maintain that support staff is added for all mainstreamed students, but teachers and principals say this is rarely done.
“It is setting everyone up for failure,” said Cydney Fields, the principal at Ray Elementary School, 5631 S. Kimbark Ave., and an expert in autism who coordinated all Chicago public school special education programs for 6 years before becoming a principal. “They say there are (support services), but let’s be realistic. I don’t see those in place.”
“I find it is getting harder to teach now than ever,” said teacher Marva Christian, a 14-year veteran of Woodlawn’s Carnegie School. “You take a kid who does not make progress and place him back in the regular class, and that child will not let you teach anybody.”
“My fear is that improperly mainstreamed children will be walking the hallways of our public schools like the new homeless,” said Dr. Larry Silver, a professor and director of training in child and adolescent psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C.
“Much as it happened in our cities, the quality of life in the classroom will continue to deteriorate for the regular students, and we are actually destroying the chances that these children will integrate.”
One thing mainstreaming has done is spawned its own Orwellian language, layers of bureaucracy, and triplicate paperwork.
The new Parent Advocacy Services Department, for instance, was created to “assist parents in facilitating the termination of special education services.”
Similarly, the new Intervention Assistance Teams are deployed to evaluate children who have been placed at private schools because of their profound disabilities and to move “as many children as possible” back to their neighborhood schools.
Chicago currently sends 2,035 mentally disabled students to private day schools-at an average cost of $12,700-a-year per student, more than twice the cost of a public education-and 184 others to therapeutic boarding schools, which cost an average of $47,300.
In July, such a team reviewed the needs of James Curry, a thin, shy 14-year-old who is described in psychiatric records as a cooperative and hard-working youth who has an IQ of about 65 and profound emotional disabilities.
James’ language skills range from those of a 2- to 5-year-old, a recent independent speech evaluation showed.
Since 1986, the school system has paid his tuition-now roughly $19,000 a year-to attend the Beacon Therapeutic School, a day school housed in a former mansion on a tree-lined street in the Beverly neighborhood on the South Side.
The team members never met James. But after reviewing his school records, they decided that he no longer had a speech-and-language impairment. They recommended that his psychotherapy be cut from 330 minutes-a-week of individual and group sessions to 15 minutes in which a psychologist would offer consultation to his classroom teacher. And they eliminated his occupational therapy.
James’ mother, Myrtle Mobley, a stocky, plain-speaking South Sider, appealed the team’s decision to an impartial state-appointed hearing officer, and in January, the officer reversed the team’s decisions and suggested that its conduct violated federal laws.
“The change in status was based upon the opinion of (school officials) who had no direct contact with James,” wrote hearing officer Shana Erenberg.
The team came to Beacon to review James’ records in July. When his mother tried to participate, she was “quieted by the case coordinator for the Chicago Public Schools,” Erenberg wrote. This was an apparent violation of federal laws that ensure parents a say in school-placement decisions.
Mobley and one of James’ teachers testified that during that meeting, the team’s learning-disability expert dozed off several times and had to be nudged awake by his partner.
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The team’s elimination of James’ diagnosis as learning disabled is important because children with only one handicapping condition are not eligible for special education beyond the normal school day. Such extended services cost the Board of Education an additional $4,000 a year.
But perhaps most troubling was an unexplained alteration made in one of James’ school records:
In May, James had been given a routine evaluation by a school sytem psychologist, who gave Beacon officials a copy of his report. It showed that James was emotionally disturbed. But when a copy of the same evaluation was presented by the team, it contained new language saying the emotional disturbance “is felt secondary” to a learning disability.
If a child is learning disabled and not emotionally disturbed, he should not be in a private therapeutic school like Beacon.
School board officials say they cannot explain when or by whom the report was changed and are investigating.
In every instance where services were reduced, the team based its conclusions on “incomplete and inadequate evaluations,” Erenberg wrote.
She restored the mentally disabled boy’s speech and language therapy, occupational therapy, psychological and social-work services, and she confirmed his need for an extended school day.
Board attorneys have appealed her ruling.
In July, a similar assistance team evaluated 13-year-old Richard Sanders and decided to transfer him from Beacon to a class for handicapped kids in his neighborhood school and eliminate almost all the extra services he had been getting.
Richard’s mother, Dorothy Sanders, is fighting the move with a special urgency: She is a Chicago public school teacher.
In each of the four biology classes she teaches at Englewood High School, Sanders said, there is usually a student or two who has “some type of disorder and is not keeping up and should not be there.”
Some of them cannot read as well as Richard, an emotionally disturbed boy whose IQ has been measured at 46.
“I wonder how a child got that far, not being able to read,” she said.
Mentally disabled children get “pushed through the system,” she said, “and I don’t want that to happen to Richard.”
At age 6, Richard didn’t talk much but clicked his tongue, sang, flapped his arms and had the language skills of a 2-year-old, his school records show.
His teacher’s goal that year was for him to “spontaneously use a two-word sentence.”
Now he is 13, 6 feet tall, over 250 pounds, and profoundly difficult to teach, psychological records show. He is apt to wander around the room, chewing his fingers or growing agitated when he cannot do the 2nd- or 3rd-grade work he is given.
Since being at Beacon, he has improved a great deal, his mother said. He started with no speech and now has the vocabulary of a healthy 8-year-old. He is learning how to shop and cook, make his own bed, and begin to live independently.
She has filed an appeal contesting the decision, and Richard is still at Beacon.
“I think your child should be educated in an environment that’s as close as possible to the one he’ll face in real life,” Sanders said. “If they had the services for Richard, it would be fine for him to go to a public school because they have good teachers working for the public schools. But they don’t have the services he and his teachers need.”
In the state’s wealthier school districts and in some inner-city schools that have small and carefully supervised programs, mainstreaming has gone relatively smoothly for children with mental disabilities and those without.
Standing in a hallway of Sullivan Elementary School, in a 19th Century building at 83rd Street and Houston Avenue at the edge of the old steel mill district, an emotionally disturbed 4th grader named Jacob twists his fingers in his hair and explains why he is glad it happened to him.
“They give you more responsibility,” he says in a halting voice.
His schoolmate Allen, an emotionally disturbed 7th grader, proudly lists some of those added responsibilities: