The largest public school system in the country fails special education
Before Noel Scott’s son started kindergarten, she toured many schools. On her visits, Scott would pass through color-coordinated classrooms with reading corners where sunlight beamed on walls decorated by student work. But when she reached the classrooms her son, who has Down syndrome, might learn in, she would grow frustrated.
“If there’s anything on the wall, it’s behavioral charts, or random worksheets that have nothing to do with anything their typical peers are doing in the next room,” she said.
Scott is the mother of a boy in the special education system in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She is also the director of special education at a charter school that works with incarcerated children. As of October, her son was still at his preschool, although he should have been in kindergarten. She had not yet found an appropriate placement within the district, Scott said.
Special day classes are made up of students in special education. According to Scott, this kind of learning environment aims to provide students with services that meet their specific needs, such as individualized aides or assistive technology.
“I would leave and I would cry because what I witnessed is educational neglect,” she said. “I would call it more like warehousing of kids with special needs.”
During these tours, Scott said she witnessed teachers and aides on their phones, ignoring the students. One classroom didn’t even have a teacher and instead was run by two aides and a parent volunteer.
“The resource specialist told me that there had not been a teacher in that classroom for the entire school year,” Scott said. “This is what LAUSD thinks of my child.”
Historically, special education has not been a big priority for LAUSD, said Lucia Arias, the special education representative for the United Teachers Los Angeles board of directors.
“We’ve always been the step-child in L.A. Unified,” she said.
For contract talks between the teacher’s union and the school district, special education hasn’t even been a topic of discussion since the 1980s, said Arias, who has worked in elementary special education in LAUSD for 37 years.
Current challenges include large class sizes and the prevalence of span classes, which include students from three to five grade levels. A single room could have 5- to 9-year-olds. Each student still does grade-specific work. However, Arias said the educational and social needs of a third grader versus a kindergartener are vastly different. While kindergartners are still learning how to share with a playmate, third graders should be learning to manage in a larger society.
“That’s basically a one-room schoolhouse,” Arias said.
Melodie Bitter, who has taught in LAUSD for 32 years and has often worked in special education, is one of the Valley West representatives on the UTLA board of directors. Bitter said, in August 2016, she had 24 third, fourth and fifth graders in her special day class. The average learning disability class for third through fifth grade is 18 students.
“After I got done laughing or crying, whichever, I made some phone calls,” Bitter said.
Bitter was set on fixing this and called her principal, whose solution involved moving some of the students to another room, which would have expanded that particular class’ size to five grade levels. That was not the solution she wanted.
Bitter called a district representative whose job involves bettering general education campus access for special education students. She knew the representative because she had worked with her as a program specialist in the past.
The district representative visited Bitter’s class and concluded that it was ridiculous to try to fit 24 special education students in a tiny room with a single teacher. But after a long round of phone tag, there was still no solution.
Bitter called the representative one more time and said she would have the union contact the media if nothing changed. She recalls saying, “My school is going to be on the news and it’s going to spread like wildfire what’s happening in these classes. I want something done.”
District officials then decided they needed to find another teacher. The decision came at the end of October 2016.
LAUSD did not comment on the matter.
In addition to large class sizes and classrooms with multiple grade levels, Bitter and Melodie explained teachers are having a difficult time including special education students in general education classrooms.
The California Department of Education first made recommendations about inclusive classrooms in 2016. This came after an in-depth report about special education in public schools supported the integration of general and special education classrooms.
“They wanted to do this inclusion, so they started it and didn’t include teachers and didn’t have a plan and just said, ‘Oh, well you know, you just develop it organically,’” Arias said.
LAUSD did not provide comment upon request.
Without time and money for proper preparation, bringing special education students into general education is not easily manageable.
On top of all this, each student in special education has to have an Individualized Education Program, or an IEP. These yearly-revised programs plan what a student will need to ensure their success in school. IEPs are for students who, for example, have a hearing disability and need assistive technology or have Attention-Deficit Disorder and need extended testing time. Processing IEPs takes a lot of time, partly because it involves testing the students and meeting with families and specialists.
In theory, including kids in special and general education is a good idea. However, the teachers — some of whom had never worked with special education students — weren’t given time to prepare.
“When you’re forcing inclusion on students, it’s not always a good thing,” Arias said.
Still, Scott champions an inclusive classroom setting.
“Segregating any human in any circumstance is never beneficial to society,” she said. “There is no special education world for them to live in. There’s no alternative. So if we’re not setting them up for success and if we’re not setting our typical kids up to embrace people who are different, then we don’t have a chance at getting to our end goal. It has to be a team effort. Schools help us raise our kids.”
On Aug. 7, Scott published a blog post through Speak Up United Parents that detailed the reality of finding a good kindergarten placement at a school in LAUSD. In the post she vowed to keep fighting for her son. Scott said the blog post had comments within minutes of publication and that the reaction was overwhelmingly supportive. Some comments thanked her for speaking out.
However, Scott said she stopped looking at the comments because some disagreed with her support of inclusive classrooms. In the post, she criticized the district for separating students in special education from students in general education classes. One comment reads, “I’m a special day class teacher of 20 years in my profession and I’m offended that you would write this! Students with disabilities are on a very large spectrum and a one-size-fits-all model is ridiculous!” Scott’s blog post was shared more than 8,000 times.
Scott wants her son to be alongside his peers in a one-grade classroom. The district says it’s an option, she explains, but that is only true for select areas of the district. The San Fernando Valley might have inclusive options, but she and her family live in South L.A., Scott said.
At the end of January, a strike by LAUSD teachers finally concluded negotiations with the district that had been going on for two years. Although it wasn’t a large topic, conversation touched on special education.
“We were at least discussed this time. Many times we’re not even a topic of discussion,” Arias said. “Special education will be a re-opener for contract talks in January 2020. So, we do feel like we got something and that we got our own section of the contract for the first time, so that was a big deal.”
At the start of each contract negotiation, the union will select its top two or three matters it deems most important to negotiate. With special education now affecting general education teachers, special education was overwhelmingly considered a top matter for January 2020 negotiations.
Gifty Beets, assistant director of labor relations at LAUSD, acts as the liaison between the district and the union. The labor relations office is responsible for negotiating all employee contracts. Beets explained the district didn’t want teachers to move forward with a strike earlier this year for a variety of reasons. For one, special education students would not be able to access their school-related services during the strike.
“The district thought that we had to make a case for our students because we have a large population of special education students,” Beets explains.
The teachers went on strike anyway, which ended after six days and an intense negotiation process. The agreement included a pay raise for teachers and a reduction in class sizes. As for special education often not being a priority in negotiations, Beets said she wouldn’t look at it like they were left out. Moving forward, they have a team from the district and the teachers’ union that are set to meet soon to make recommendations about equal workload for special education staff. She also notes the district supports classrooms of special and general education students as an option for classroom settings.
At a bargaining session last year, the teachers’ union and district developed an official understanding for implementing a pilot program to bring special education students into general education classrooms. It was the first step of progress for the program after the district stalled for two sessions, according to the union.
“I am very hopeful with this contract re-opener,” Bitter said. “I’m trying to be super hopeful because this is the first time in my entire career I’ve ever seen a focus on special ed, so we’ll have to see where it goes from here.”
At the end of January, the teachers’ union began the contract bargaining process. One item on the list of demands was special education support. However, at the Feb. 12 and 26 bargaining sessions, the district did not present any counter proposals for special education-related demands. The next session will be March 26.
