Thursday’s Children : Schools: A special education campus is coping with the first wave of drug-damaged youngsters. For some of the students, who face an array of developmental problems, it’s an uphill battle.

Michelle is 4 years old and cute as a button. She can sing “Skip to My Lou” by heart and count to 12, and, she says, she is “the most popular girl in the whole wide school.”

Visitors to McBride Elementary School in Mar Vista often ask what she is doing at the special education campus, surrounded by children with more visible handicaps such as Down’s syndrome and cerebral palsy.

Michelle and her twin brother, Michael, were born addicted to cocaine--three months premature, weighing less than two pounds each, and destined to suffer developmental and learning problems. (The names of Michelle and all other children in this article have been changed to protect their privacy.)

Michelle has made tremendous progress, but she still can’t pay attention to an activity at school for more than a few minutes, and sometimes she does strange, impulsive things. At home recently, she seriously injured her puppy by bashing it against a concrete floor.

The first generation of crack babies has hit the schools.

Nobody knows how many drug-damaged children are already enrolled, but educators believe that the first big wave entered kindergarten last fall. An estimated 300,000 babies exposed to drugs are born each year in the United States. If the trend continues, there will be 4 million youngsters suffering the effects of prenatal exposure to drugs by the end of the decade. In some inner-city schools, experts say, 40% to 60% of the students could soon be drug-affected.

Many, even most, of these youngsters end up in regular classrooms and are able to function more or less normally. But doctors, social workers and day-care centers are referring increasing numbers of them to preschool classes such as those offered at McBride for early intervention and specialized help.

Teachers at McBride, one of 18 special education schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, first noticed large numbers of preschoolers exhibiting the hyperactive behavior associated with prenatal drug exposure about three years ago.

“All of a sudden, it was half of the (new preschool students),” recalled Steve Barragar, the principal, in a recent interview.

Barragar said he tells staff the school is aboard a racing train. “You just have to jump on and hang on,” he said. McBride has in the past two years doubled the number of its early intervention preschool classes from two to four. But more drug-exposed children arrive every month.

“There’s an explosion of these children,” said Phillip T. Callison, the assistant superintendent who oversees special education schools throughout the district. “They will be hard to teach.”

The teacher in Room 14 is trying to get her students to march to music, but Jason is running from one side of the room to the other. When an aide stops him, Jason jumps and screams. Then he puts his hands in his mouth and bites them: his arms are scarred from his teeth. The aide calms Jason, but another drug-affected child, James, starts bawling.

“March, march!” the teacher says in a loud, cheerful voice. “Maar! Maaar!” says Joanna, 6, stomping after her teacher. But two boys are running around screaming, another is trying to dart out the door into the hall, and James is still crying. Finally an aide realizes the boy’s cracker has fallen to the floor. James is 5, but he lacks the words to ask for another.

Children who have been exposed to drugs can suffer a variety of neurological, behavioral and developmental problems that make teaching chaotic. These symptoms include an inability to concentrate, sudden mood swings, severe speech delays, hyperactivity, memory problems and an apparent lack of emotion.

Some of these children can’t make sense out of the environment around them, much less the alphabet. Jason, for example, bites rubber dolls, throws toy cars and goes down slides headfirst. He also clambers over other children as if they are not there, teachers say.

These children require a lot of individual attention. Each class of 10 has a teacher and two aides, but Jason’s aggressive behavior requires nearly constant supervision from one of them. “If he had had a hammer, he would have used it on somebody,” says Diane Carpenter, his year-round teacher.

Children hit hardest by their mothers’ addiction to drugs and alcohol can suffer from severe retardation and seizures. A few of these students are in the North building of the campus, where the most severely handicapped and retarded children are. On a recent morning one of them, 7-year-old Daniel, was learning how to stand. “Yeah, what a big boy!” teacher Caroline Hart said as she pulled him up on legs as thin as sticks. Daniel has a feeding tube and is confined to a wheelchair, but just the same he is often smiling. “Hi! How you!” he says over and over to anybody who passes him.

The vast majority of drug-affected students at McBride are educable, astonishing even their teachers with their progress. Carpenter recalls the day James helped her lay some newspaper on the ground for the Easter Bunny’s cage. She had been working on just getting him to talk instead of crying, and all of a sudden he started reading the paper.

“Billy, sit down!” says Rosemarie Lagunas, the substitute teacher in Room 16. Michelle and her classmates are drawing letters. A tiny boy with a cowlick is swaggering around the room complaining that another boy ran into him with a tricycle. “You coulda broke my head! Bad boy!” Billy says.

An aide scoops him up and plops him into a chair. Billy’s hands dart out and he grabs a fistful of crayons. The aide tells him to write a B, for Billy. The 6-year-old peers at his paper and the B his teacher drew and scribbles madly for four seconds. Then he pops out of his chair and grabs Michelle’s sheet of wobbly Ms. “Billy, sit down!” Lagunas says.

The class sings songs next. Michelle makes up a verse about eating chocolate pizza that catches her classmates’ attention. But when they sing “The Muffin Man,” a child with Down’s syndrome leaves and puts his head down on a table, crying. Billy jumps out of his chair to follow the boy. “Billy, sit down!” Lagunas says.

Billy was prenatally exposed to alcohol and possibly other drugs. He cannot pay attention to his teachers long enough to learn to count past three. When he arrived at McBride, he would spit, hit, and swear.

But teachers suspected that Billy, an abused child, was mostly looking for affection, and they gave it to him. He will probably always be moderately retarded, and his summer teacher, Grace Mangione, suspects he may never leave McBride. But his behavior has improved, and he recently announced he wanted to be a “good boy” so he could grow up to be Batman, the character on his bedspread in a group foster home.

To focus the energy of the children, classes are very structured. Routines change little from day to day. Teachers prepare the children for changes, like lunch, by collecting them in a circle and announcing the coming event in a bright, cheerful voice. Children who fly into fits are allowed to kick it out in a corner. If they ram their heads into a wall in frustration, an aide will hold them until they calm down.

When they misbehave, they are put in the dreaded time out chair in a corner. When they are good, they receive hugs, praise, happy face stickers, crackers, even kernels of popcorn. Cookies are taboo--the sugar makes the children too jumpy.

Goals are established for each child. Michelle needed to learn how to stay focused, follow instructions and catch a ball. Billy needed to learn his colors, how to count, hold a crayon and use complete sentences. So his teacher had him repeat simple phrases, like “I will sit down.”

It is Wednesday morning--the doctor’s day at McBride. A 26-year-old mother with four children in tow shows up an hour late for her appointment. She tells Dr. Soon Kwak that she wants her two boys admitted to the school.

Psychologist Charmaine Meyer runs the 4-year-old through some tests to see if he exhibits the delays and behavior problems that would qualify him for admission. The boy puts a black pebble in a glass, builds a tower from colored cubes, and identifies shapes and colors.

“He’s a bloody genius compared to the kids I’ve been seeing,” Meyer says.

The mother is having more trouble answering questions about her sons’ vaccinations. Recently out of jail, she regained custody of them a month ago.

She had lost custody of the 4-year-old after he ingested some PCP, but the mother is more worried about his brother, 3. She was addicted to cocaine during his pregnancy. “I used all the way up to the last minute with him,” she tells the doctor.

Kwak asks if she realized she could harm her baby. “Yeah, but I was just angry at the time,” the mother says.

The mother says she has completed some parenting courses, is going to Alcoholics Anonymous and is clean of drugs. She had saved enough money to get her boys back earlier, but spent it on a funeral for a daughter who died of spinal problems 28 days after birth.

After the family leaves, the doctor, nurse, psychologist and principal decide the two boys will probably be admitted to McBride. But the staff is concerned about the mother. With her history of crime, drugs and alcohol, and her inability to even make it to her appointment on time, what chance does she have of keeping the family together and off drugs?

Teaching children is just half the battle, teachers say. Reaching parents is the other half. Teachers debate which is worse: the drugs that damage the children’s brains, or the homes that scar their hearts.

Joanna, the girl in Room 14 who loves to march, was hospitalized several times before she was 2: At birth, there were the withdrawal symptoms from prenatal exposure to cocaine; later, when her parents mixed alcohol with her bottle; then when she ingested PCP, and finally when her father sexually abused her.

“Her parents fried her brain--it’s a goner,” Carpenter said. Carpenter said that about all she can hope now is to “teach her how to say two words--even if they’re bye-bye.”

The children who do best are the ones who receive the most love at home. Not long ago, Ransom, 4, suffered seizures and brain damage from prenatal drug exposure. He lay on a blanket and stared at the ceiling. “He was catatonic,” his aunt recalled. She showered him with kisses anyway, and music. One day, she noticed his foot was beating time to the song playing on the car radio.

Ransom still needs to work on his speech. But he is bright and happy, and now when he can’t communicate, he showers people he likes with little kisses instead of hits. “He’s my walking miracle child,” his aunt, a nurse who works with drug babies, says. “There is hope for these children.”

Ransom is scheduled to leave McBride this fall. He will take special education classes at a regular campus. So will his classmate Michelle. She is thrilled.

“I’m going to be 5 on August the second . . . and then, bye-bye!” she told a recent visitor. “I’m going to a new school!”

Teachers, parents and psychologists decide together where to put students once they reach age 5. Children with severe disabilities are kept at McBride. Some enter regular kindergarten classes. Most, however, end up in one of the variety of special classes at regular campuses for children with handicaps.

Joyce Brouwer, a veteran teacher at McBride, estimates that as many as half of the children who leave McBride end up failing the programs they are put into. Sometimes, her colleagues said, they fail because the class teachers recommend for them is full.

Rob Finkle, former psychologist at the school, said, however, that the real problem is that these children present such a multitude of learning problems that it’s hard to place them.

“It’s a new category of child,” he said. “We’re just coming to grips with how to teach them and where to put them.”

McBride staffers are especially concerned about the wave of drug-affected youngsters who will end up in regular classrooms, where classes now have up to 33 students.

While McBride has three physical education teachers, two speech therapists, a physical therapy department, two full-time nurses and two psychologists, there is little money for such support staff on regular campuses.

“These kids are set up for failure. With all the budget cuts and increases in class size, it’s hard even for normal kids to make it,” says Roslyn Vinson-Olive, a school nurse.

Teachers on the regular campuses are already calling McBride desperate for advice. They must be trained how to handle drug-affected youngsters, or there will be bedlam, warned Mangione, a summer teacher at McBride who also is a district consultant and a teacher at Loyola Marymount University.

“Teachers are going to have to change,” Mangione said. “Because this is our new population.”

She gestures to her class scattered around the playground. It is recess. Billy is scolding nobody in particular. “He’s a bad boy, she’s a bad boy, you’re a bad boy!” he says, shaking his finger. An aide is chasing a child who has wandered back into the school.

“Look at me!” yells Michelle. She is climbing the jungle gym. Ransom looks, and starts to clamber up too.

“Look at me! I’m at the top!” Michelle shouts again, proud of herself and so very unaware of all the climbing ahead of her.