By Brian Bushway
Staff Writer
Last week the Los Angeles Unified School District decided to eliminate special education schools and place students with disabilities into classes with non-disabled students over the next four years.
Placing students with disabilities into mainstream classrooms is a good idea and one that is long over due. From my personal experience, mainstreaming students with disabilities is the ultimate answer in the education processes if you want them to be successful.
Becoming blind at 14 during my eighth grade year, it was recommended and commonly believed by professionals in the special education field that I should be bused an hour out of my area to a school with a program already established in dealing with visually impaired students.
OK, there is some logic behind this thinking. They had experience, so they will know exactly what to do to teach me the skills necessary to be successful academically.
But that’s the problem. Academics isn’t everything. In order for a person to be successful in life, he or she needs to have a balance of academic knowledge and social grace. One does not learn social grace from reading books, he or she learns it from interacting with people.
The problem with special education schools is that students are segregated, and an environment for natural social interaction is not found there. If someone is expecting a person with a disability to contribute to society, which everyone should, then individuals with disabilities must be educated in an environment that the rest of society was educated in. This way, they too will have learned the same skills in and outside the classroom.
A person with a disability needs to learn how to relate to the majority of the world, so they don’t come across as being awkward or weird, which many do.
Who wants to hang out with someone who’s weird? Or what employer is going to hire someone who comes across as incredibly awkward?
Well, my roommate is a little weird, but he still hangs out with friends and has a job. But that’s a different type of weird — he still has social grace.
Fortunately for me, my parents were level-headed and listened to the dissenting opinion to keep me at my neighborhood school and piece together a program where I could learn Braille and white cane travel skills in a natural social environment.
It was in this environment where I learned how to deal with my disability for myself and in regards to others. I figured out the social challenges of how to get my peers to accept and perceive me the way I wanted them to.
And I must have done this all successfully considering I’m at Pepperdine now.
It’s encouraging to think that all students with disabilities will be mainstreamed. However, I am not sure that in some cases mainstreaming is appropriate. Every disability calls for different accommodations and even students with the same disabilities require different accommodations.
So deciding the proper education program should be done on a case-by-case basis. Each educational program should ensure that the student be given the chance to push his or her abilities as far as they wish to go.
So often topics of this nature are discussed with an underlining tone of discontent because resources are being spent on individuals who are considered burdens — people who have nothing to contribute. But if people spend time getting to know a person with a disability — even a severe one — they will find they have learned a lot and that all people have something to contribute.
It is only a matter of opening your eyes long enough to see what contributions people have to give. Taking disabled children out of special education schools is a wonderful decision and will allow this to happen.
February 07, 2002