Posted on: Monday, July 9, 2001
Special-needs net may be too wide
By Alice Keesing
Advertiser Education Writer
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| Lee Green, 11, was identified as special needs, but his mother, Jodie, fought the diagnosis. Now, Lee travels the world competing in yo-yo competitions.
Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser |
Lee Green was 6 when they put him on drugs.
Three and a half pills a day to calm him down and make him sit still.
Lee's Hawai'i Kai school had recommended he see a psychiatrist, who diagnosed him with attention deficit disorder. His mother, Jodie Green, said the school told her they wouldn't take Lee unless he was medicated. But she felt like she'd lost her son. The drugs turned Lee into a zombie, Green said; he couldn't eat and was constantly sleepy.
"He just wasn't my child anymore," she said.
After two years, Green couldn't bear what the drugs were doing to her son and she took him off the medication without telling anyone and without the school noticing. Three years later, Lee is an active child, avid about yo-yoing, skateboarding and football, and proud of an end-of-year report card bearing five A's in his art classes.
Lee's story is just one piece of a complex debate swirling around Hawai'i's special education system: Are Island schools labeling too many children as special needs?
While Hawai'i struggles to fix its years of neglect of disabled children and comply with the Felix federal court order to improve services, some argue that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, scooping up children like Lee in the process.
On one hand, there are Island families still fighting to get the help their disabled children deserve by law.
On the other hand, there are those who argue that special education has become a dumping ground for children whom teachers cannot deal with because of large class sizes and increasing demands. That the system is too ready to diagnose and drug. That some parents are pushing for services because they believe it's the only way to get extra help. And that the Felix consent decree has created an environment where schools are so afraid of being sued that they won't deny services.
Misidentifying costs everyone
Fueled by persistent stories of overidentification, the Legislature has launched a rare investigation that, among other things, will look at how children are identified for special education.
"It's a concern because we have received calls in the past several weeks from (Department of Education) personnel who are telling us that there is a problem with overidentification, that kids are just being lumped into that category," said Rep. Scott Saiki, co-chair of the investigative committee.
A recent report from legislative auditor Marion Higa suggested that a vague definition of eligibility has opened the floodgates for services and driven up costs, which are $700 million during the next two years. And there are others who believe the special education net has been cast too wide.
Irene Igawa, who oversees special education for the Hawai'i State Teachers Association, believes some children are incorrectly diagnosed with behavioral disabilities because they are acting out as a result of problems at home.
"We just came out of the worst economic period of our history, we know that unemployment was rampant, we know that domestic abuse was rampant, we know that drug abuse is rampant in many communities," Igawa said. "You put all those together and you have very, very at-risk kids ... you should not be putting these other kids into special ed classes because they're not disabilities in that sense."
That's not to say that these children don't need help, Igawa said, but the solution must lie with the broader community and not just the schools.
Reading initiatives improve
Schools chief Paul LeMahieu vehemently argues that the system is not overidentifying, pointing out that Hawai'i is only now reaching the national average for the percentage of children identified as special needs. There are 23,000 Hawai'i children in special education — accounting for 12 percent of students in public schools or 10 percent if private school enrollments are included. The national average is 14 percent.
But the war of words surrounding special education has escalated as the Legislature prepares to turn the magnifying glass on spending, and as a federal judge is poised to decide next month whether to take over a system that has consistently failed to improve as ordered.
"Show me a kid that's been identified when they shouldn't have been," said Ivor Groves, the court-appointed monitor who oversees the state's progress in the Felix case. "Is there one out there somewhere? There could be. Are there a lot of them out there? I don't think so."
However, both Groves and LeMahieu do agree that in the rush to comply with Felix, the system has become over-reliant on more costly and more invasive medical solutions. And they agree that some children would probably not need special education if they were properly taught to read at an early age.
The solution is already in the works, they say.
The department has stepped up its reading initiatives in the early grades. It is constructing a safety net — the so-called Comprehensive Student Support System — that aims to help every child before problems escalate to greater levels.
And last week, the departments of Education and Health formally executed one of the most far-reaching initiatives of the Felix consent decree. Services that have been delivered by the Department of Health are now officially in the hands of the schools. In the past five years, the DOE has increased its team of special education teachers, psychologists, social workers and behavioral health specialists from 2,600 to 6,400.
The switch to school-based services also will eliminate the possible conflict of private providers both diagnosing children, then delivering the services to them, according to Doug Houck who heads up the department's special education efforts.
"I've heard situations where people have come into (the meetings where they decide what treatment a child needs) and said you need these services and, oh by the way, I'm the one to provide the services," Houck said.
Hawai'i is not alone in its debate about which children should rightfully be classified as special needs. The same questions are being asked across the nation as Congress prepares to reauthorize the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act — the federal law that underpins the special education movement.
Kids lumped together
A recent report by the Washington-based Progressive Policy Institute also addressed the question of overidentification and pointed the finger at the category of learning disabilities, which it said has a "hazy" definition for eligibility.
"Special education began as a program for children with clearly identified physical and mental handicaps," according to the report. "Today, however, it 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."
As on the Mainland, children with learning disabilities make up nearly half of Hawai'i's special education population.
Some of the misapprehensions about learning disabilities may have arisen because the public is not familiar with special education law, according to Jennifer Schember-Lang, executive director of the Learning Disabilities Association of Hawai'i.
"Kids don't look learning disabled," she said. "Kids with speech language impairments don't look disabled. Kids with traumatic brain injury, they don't look disabled, either. So it is hard for the public to understand why these millions of dollars are being spent on special ed."
'Educational death sentence'
Hawai'i has yet to catch up with the Mainland trend that once again views special education as a stigma, according to Mary Anne Raywid, an affiliate faculty member at the University of Hawai'i and a nationally recognized authority on school reform.
Raywid also believes that labeling a child with a disability can be an "educational death sentence."
"They get a dumbed-down curriculum so that each year they remain there it becomes more impossible for them ever to catch up." she said. "So what you get by the end of their school career is a kid who has been done in by the institution."
That's exactly what Jodie Green did not want to happen to Lee.
After Green took Lee off the drugs, she refused to sign the paperwork that would have given him special education services and Lee no longer attends any of his former special ed classes. His school would not comment on his case, citing confidentiality laws.
Instead of the drugs, Lee got hooked on yo-yos, becoming so good that he has traveled the world performing. The sport gave Lee a focus and a belief in his own abilities that Green says justifies her original belief that her son was not disabled — just bored.
As Lee lay on his back on the pink carpet at home last week, spinning two yo-yos within inches of his face, Green watched with a smile.
"They told us he could never do something like that."
