Enabling the Learning Disabled

Thirty years ago, Ali Brown watched as her learning-disabled sister failed to get the services she needed at school. She was lumped into classes with other San Diego children afflicted with a variety of disabilities—emotional, attention, auditory, visual, speech. Brown now has a learning-disabled child and can testify that although special-education programs in the San Diego city school district are far from perfect, they’ve come a long way since she and her sister were children.

Some 17,000 of the approximately 140,000 students in the district qualify for special-education classes. By far, the greatest number of children are learning-disabled, which includes dyslexia and is defined legally as a discrepancy between the child’s measured potential and achievement. Disabilities manifest themselves in such areas as oral and written expression or listening comprehension. A learning-disabled child receives and processes information differently than most.

Brown’s 12-year-old son has sensory-integration difficulties, which make it tough for him to read and write and to understand mathematics. He attends Excelsior Academy in Allied Gardens, which serves only learning-disabled children. Nance Maguire, the school’s director, says Excelsior—a recipient in 2002 of the National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence Award from the U.S. Department of Education—is very good at teaching children to advocate for themselves, a skill they will need throughout their lives.

Brown spent two years pushing the school district to refer her son to Excelsior. Despite that experience, she says she’s not bitter. Instead, she hopes that the appointment last year of Roxy Jackson as executive director of the school district’s special-education department signals a change in the right direction.

Joan Landguth, president of the San Diego Learning Disabilities Association, says Jackson’s philosophy about special education helped develop “really good education models for kids with learning disabilities. I have a lot of faith in her.” Coming from Landguth, a major complainant against the San Diego Unified School District for the last decade on behalf of learning-disabled children, that says a lot.

Since 1994, Landguth has filed complaints along with other parents accusing the district of not providing services needed by learning-disabled youngsters. Several years ago, the district put some students back into regular classrooms to more closely follow the law, which requires that students be served in the least-restrictive environment. Landguth says this backfired. “We filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights and the California Department of Education. After that, the state came in with corrective action.”

It took years to rectify things. In 2001, Landguth says the district started coming up with interesting, cutting-edge programs, such as Del Sol Academy—a school serving children with a range of behavioral and learning problems. Jackson, at that time the special education program manager for the school district, was responsible for the creation of Del Sol four years ago. According to many parents, it’s been an unequivocal success.

Only a small percentage of learning-disabled children are severely affected enough to attend Del Sol, and total enrollment is under 100. Most learning-disabled students receive special-education support and instruction for less than half the day with a resource specialist, either in the class alongside typical children or out of class.

“The largest number of learning-disabled students do fine with a resource specialist,” says Mary Sue Glynn, one of two directors of the school district’s special-education programs department. Some require more intensive services in half-day special-ed classes.

Jackson says the majority of students’ needs are met either with the resource specialist or the special day classes. “The law requires us to put the child in the least-restrictive environment, and we follow that,” she says. “Children learn from one another. Social skills in this world are just as important as every other skill, so they need to know how to fit in.”

Under Jackson’s leadership, the district is expanding its highly regarded Learning Centers program. These after-school special-education programs, now located at four city elementary schools, are designed for students who attend neighborhood schools. After school they are bused to one of these centers, where they receive up to two hours of intensive instruction geared specifically toward their disabilities.

“The idea is that if we give them this intensive help,” says Jackson, “they won’t have to come for very long. Students typically come to learning centers for about a year, and it’s been very successful.”

Jackson’s focus in the last year has been to improve the ability of special-education teachers, to empower them through proper training to be able to make informed decisions around instruction for each child. “Special education is hugely complicated,” she says. “Each child is different, and teachers don’t just teach one curriculum.”

To that end, Jackson has reorganized the structure of the special-education department, adding site-based, diagnostic resource teachers. These 50 professionals, brought in from outside the district, receive intensive training and are assigned to schools to support teachers, parents and students.

“These are our change agents, the go-to person at schools,” says Jackson. “If they don’t know the answer to a question you have, they will find it and get back to you.”

But there are still problems. Parents complain teachers and administrators still aren’t responsive enough, that they have to fight tooth-and-nail to get the right services for their children.

Joan Landguth says if all learning-disabled kids struggling in early grades got needed services, they would do well later on. But they don’t, she complains. “Only after your child keeps failing do you finally get more specialized services,” says Landguth.

Jackson and Glynn don’t claim to have a perfect solution. “Education is a difficult, complicated process itself, even with typical students,” says Glynn. Add to that the unique needs of a child who is learning-disabled and the myriad legal mandates that must be met, and you wind up with a model for learning that is constantly—and urgently—evolving.

Science in Small Doses

The Elementary Institute of Science offers hands-on learning to small groups of focused inner-city kids

Just off the Martin Luther King Freeway in a southeastern San Diego neighborhood, there stands a dazzling new building with multicolored walls and giant green rotundas shaped like laboratory beakers. This is the Elementary Institute of Science (EIS), a $6 million facility devoted to low-cost, extracurricular science instruction for local children, ages 7-13.

EIS provides what many public schools cannot: small classes and practical instruction. The institute limits its classes to 10 students each and teaches such subjects as computer science, biology, chemistry, astronomy and engineering.

“Schools may have the textbook ability to teach science, but with large classes, it may be very difficult to let kids actually see what they’ve read about in action,” says EIS director Doris Anderson. “We think of EIS as a good partner with the schools. We go hand-in-hand.”

During two-hour sessions taught by college students, children learn about everything from the double-helix structure of DNA to the inner workings of a computer. Every activity is hands-on. Students dissect frogs, build plaster volcanoes and construct model bridges out of popsicle sticks. In the computer lab, every child has his or her own computer.

“The setting is not determined by what kind of grades you get. They’ve got enough of that at school. That takes a load off some of the kids and puts a different spin on learning,” says Anderson. “We just give kids a good dose of science.” Grades aren’t given, though attendance and behavior is charted.

EIS charges each of its 400 students just $20 a month for twice-a-week classes, which means fund-raising is constantly part of its mission. It costs $500,000 a year to operate the center.

Although the facility is new, EIS has been around since 1964. Founded by a San Diego science teacher named Tom Watts, EIS operated out of a dilapidated 2,200-square-foot house on the site for more than 30 years. The new 15,000-square-foot facility, which was almost entirely funded by private grants and donors, contains several large aquariums, a lecture hall, library, conference room and nine classrooms, each tailored to a different scientific subject.

—Karen Thompson

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