INCLUSIVE CLASSROOMS

Mainstreaming students with special needs seems to help them advance

Emerson Barnett believes that he is successful today, in part, because of mainstreaming. Being included in typical classrooms allowed him and his classmates to face his cerebral palsy head-on.

Consider: As a young child, he often had to use a wheelchair, he was difficult to understand, and he needed help with eating.

Today, Barnett has ridden a bicycle across the country, drives a stick-shift car and is living in Colorado.

Barnett, who wants to go back to Colorado State University in the fall and continue pursuing his degree in mechanical engineering, describes himself as outgoing, independent and fun.

Separating students with disabilities into special-education classrooms creates fear, hatred and ignorance, Barnett said.

"I think it's a benefit to have different people in the classroom."

In a mainstreamed classroom, Barnett was always upfront about himself: "I told them that I had CP and I'm normal, except I walk a little different and talk funny."

So, exactly what is mainstreaming?

Robert Osgood, an associate professor of education at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and author of two books on the subject, says, "It is when a standard classroom accepts special-education students into the class." These students are able to adapt so that they perform at the same level academically as everyone else in the course.

Barnett sees mainstreaming as a justice issue: "Mainstreaming is supposed to put everyone through the same process . . . and give each person the same opportunity to succeed as everyone else."

Osgood believes in mainstreaming, but said some critics argue that a child with disabilities can distract the other students, or studies can be interrupted while the teacher takes care of a child with special needs.

Furthermore, some people believe that a child with disabilities placed in a regular classroom doesn't get enough individualized attention or curriculum, and the teacher doesn't have enough specialized training. Often, schools don't have enough money to implement mainstreaming properly, critics argue.

Finally, children with disabilities can feel isolated if they are taken out of a specialized educational environment that includes students like them, Osgood said. This is particularly true among deaf students, he noted, who see deafness as a part of their cultural identity and frequently choose to attend schools for the Deaf.

Osgood has written two books about mainstreaming: "The History of Inclusion in the United States," (Gallaudet University Press, 2005); and "The History of Special Education: A Struggle for Equality in American Public Schools (Praeger Publishers).

The federal government adopted into law the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975, and it was reauthorized and further strengthened in 1990 and again in 1997 and 2004, before becoming the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which guarantees education for disabled children from birth to age 21.

The groundbreaking Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which required life and work settings to be accessible to all, also became law the year Barnett began first grade.

"Emerson was integrated from the very beginning, but that's only because the law had changed," said Barnett's mother, Sheri. "Some of his teachers thought that he belonged in a special school, so it was difficult."

Often, teachers weren't prepared to deal with kids with disabilities and should have received better training, she noted.

"They didn't know how to act around him. They didn't know when to help him and when not to. He was just someone who was different, and they found him scary," Mrs. Barnett said.

But never for an instant did Barnett's parents think of placing him in a special classroom or school.

"He is more normal than not," his mother explained. "There's no other place for him. He has to somehow function in the real world, and if we had put him into a special place or kept him away from a normal life, how would he be prepared to be normal as an adult? So there was no choice."

In primary school, the Barnette family faced tremendous difficulties getting their son a proper education.>

First, there was a confrontation between Barnett's parents and his teacher: One of his teachers felt that Barnett wasn't up to par with the other students in the class and that his parents should send him to a special Southside Indianapolis school.

However, Mrs. Barnett disagreed.

"He is not retarded," she replied. "He has been fully tested; he has a high IQ and he belongs here."

Barnett stayed in the classroom, but it wasn't easy.

His parents felt that his teacher often separated Barnett from the other students. Barnett had an aide to assist him, but they didn't work well together.

By the end of the school year, the child and his parents believed he had not learned anything.

"He should repeat second grade," countered the teacher.

But the Barnetts insisted that their son should be able to move on to third grade.

"We had to threaten legal action if they didn't move him along," Mrs. Barnett said.

After Barnett's time working with a summer tutor, he did fine in third grade, Mrs. Barnett said.

Since Barnett was nearly finished with high school at the time, the No Child Left Behind Act didn't affect his education. That law, which passed Jan. 8, 2002, was designed partly to promote the benefits of mainstreaming, said Margaret Spellings, the U.S. Secretary of Education. Y-Press interviewed the secretary when she was in Indianapolis promoting reauthorization of the NCLB last fall. President Bush is pushing for the legislation to be reauthorized in 2008.

"The demand to improve services for the special-education learner really has been so much more enhanced by this law . . . so that we can make sure that every single one of our children, including special-ed kids, can get a quality education," Spellings said.

Despite all the rules, regulations and requirements, it's still challenging to be different from everyone else at school.

In elementary school, Barnett was not teased a lot, he said. But it got worse as he got older.

"When it came to middle school, people started noticing I wasn't normal," Barnett said. A classmate even called him a "freak show."

Since kids shied away from him, Barnett turned to adults for friendships. They were mature enough to understand his disability.

His mother didn't try to protect him from other children's taunts. "He was teased a lot. . . . But I think it was better both for those kids as well as for him to go ahead and learn to deal with it, because that's life. . . . it's the hand he was dealt."

She knew another child with CP about her son's age who was protected an not encouraged to get out and experience life. As a result, the boy never learned to walk or speak very well because he was embarrassed about how he looked and sounded.

But high school was a different experience. It gave Barnett an opportunity to leave most of the persecution from middle school behind.

"Once I made it to high school, I found it was a lot easier to make friends because in high school, you can get involved with different activities," he said.

At North Central High School, he was known as the guy who zoomed down the halls on a motorized scooter plastered with a Ferrari sign. He loves cars and mechanics and joined clubs associated with motor sports.

But it's not just young people with disabilities who benefit from mainstreaming -- their peers do, too, agreed the Barnett family.

"The other kids sometimes learn more themselves by teaching the kid who is in special ed," said Sheri Barnett, pointing out that anyone who teaches a subject often learns the material more thoroughly as a result.

She also pointed out that her upbeat, hard-working son has inspired students without disabilities to persevere. "Everybody says: 'Man, if he can do it, I can do it.' "

Editor's note: Emerson Barnett was a member of Y-Press, formerly known as Children's Express, from 1993 to 2003.

ASSISTANT EDITOR: Malachi Carter, 15.

REPORTERS: James Officer, 11; and Charlie Osborne, 12.

CONTRIBUTORS: Christine Beyer, 18; and Allison Gardner, 17.

Copyright 2008 Y-Press