I am a former special education student at the New York City department of education. My disability was "specific learning disability" on my IEP. Yet I was in a self contained classroom FILL TIME from kindergarten until 10th grade. In NYC they never had "part time self-contained" classroom. You were either in a self-contained classroom full time, or in a general education classroom full time. This was the case for many years. My elementary school had 550 students average, and there were 5 teachers in each grade. Only one teacher in each grade was a special education teacher. If you were placed with one teacher you were in the class full time or not at all. Heck my elementary school did not even offer co-teaching classes. So you can imagine what happened when a student's IEP was checked "yes" to eligibility for special class services.
In 2014 they changed things. New regulations required schools to offer flexible or part time programming, and stated that any student in a full time self contained classroom must be considered for part time programming first. Network, cluster and central teams will regularly review patterns of referrals for students to ensure that all recommendations are legitimately in the best interest of students and that the recommended program is the least restrictive environment appropriate for each student. If patterns of recommended programs in a particular school suggest inappropriate recommendations that do not seem in the best interest of students, central teams will conduct a more intensive audit of student IEPs. For recommendations that are not in the best interest of students, regular progressive disciplinary measures for school leaders and IEP teams will apply. This is how it should be and these regulations should be all over the country.
My friend started high school at 16. He is now 19 and has to take summer school classes. I met this kid when he was 16. He was in a district 75 schools and I questioned in my mind why he was in a district 75 school as we regularly attended a classroom style group and I saw no issues. Next year he was then placed in an inclusion program at a nearby high school. He started taking general education classes there. I spoke to him about this and he said he wished he started high school earlier. He is now 19 and has to take summer school classes just to catch up. All because the DOE started him late. He didn't need to start late. He isn't cognitively disabled and has no behavior issues. Even if he did need a specialized school, if he is not intellectually disabled he should be given the same opportunity to earn a diploma like everyone else, but he wasn't. This is totally unfair to him.
When I started 9th grade they did a triannual evaluation. The school psychologist had me write paragraphs, solve problems, etc. then they wrote an evaluation paper and said my needs cannot be met in a general education classroom. I wonder how they came to that conclusion when they never put me in a general education classroom. They only said my needs cannot be met in a general education classroom. They never explained how my needs cannot be met in a general education classroom. Even if they did no one checked the reasoning. So that was an opportunity to violate least restrictive environment.
There still needs to be reform. Around the country, schools do not provide non-verbal autistic children with access to the general education curriculum. For example teachers may teach the name of a body part and ask the student "Where is your ______?" or "What is______?" and if the student cannot answer it is assumed they do not have the cognitive ability to understand the name of the body part. Thus, they end up working on naming that one body part for many months, or even years. Imagine how frustrating is it to the student to work on the same thing repeatedly just because they cannot show that they know?
Hopefully we will fight to make changes to the special education system nationwide. No child should be discriminated in the school system.
