Advocates Fear Threat to Schools for the Disabled

VAN NUYS —  The second of two hearings on a pending legal settlement involving special education in the Los Angeles Unified School District reduced the 58-page document to one simple question: Will the district close its separate campuses for the disabled?

No, said district officials and attorneys attending the hearing, held at Birmingham High School.

“Our intent has always been to increase services, not take services away from any parent who wants them,” said Robert M. Myers, the Sherman Oaks attorney who filed the class-action suit that prompted the hearings.

Yes, said dozens of parents and advocates of disabled children who lined up to speak at the microphone.

“How many peers would our children have if you closed the special-education schools?” asked Charlotte Brodie, whose 19-year-old disabled daughter attends Miller High School in Reseda. “It’s wrong to delete any options we now have.”

For those critics, the offending citation is one line in a draft version of the legal consent decree, a framework for special-education reform that is scheduled to be amended following the hearings and submitted to the U.S. District Court on March 1:

“The district shall . . . over a period of time, integrate . . . 18 special education schools, reduce the number of . . . segregated sites and increase the number of students placed on regular school sites.”

It is a statement that clearly reflects the national trend to include special-education students in the scholastic mainstream, rather than educate them separately. But, as is often the case with legal documents, the wording’s vagueness leaves interpretation up to the reader, and the fearful parents of the severely disabled expect the worst.

These parents have worked hard to navigate the complex public education system in Los Angeles to find the schools their children now attend, and they worry that closing the schools they finally settled on will force them to start all over again.

Lucy LeBeau sends her son, Robert, to Leichman High School, a special education campus in Reseda. But she resorted to a segregated campus only after he was “taunted and ridiculed” at San Fernando Middle School, where he attended a separate special-education class, she said.

“It’s been a hard journey with Bob, and once you find a place where they can blossom, you don’t want to give it up,” LeBeau said.

Driving home the value of special-education settings that are more aware of the needs of the disabled, a deaf teacher from Marlton School--the school for the deaf--pointed out that the district’s own cable broadcast of Monday’s hearing on the case did not have written captions for deaf viewers, as many TV broadcasts do.

Mont Richardson stopped speaking aloud and used only sign language for several seconds, then added, “In case you didn’t hear me, this is the isolation I’m talking about.”

Yet, even those parents who actively support mainstreaming--as the integration of disabled children into regular schools is called--have come to the hearings to testify against the consent decree. They complain that it not only limits choices but fails to address the very problems with the system that forced some parents to turn to segregated schools in the first place.

“I’ve been at places my son was not wanted, so I empathize with them,” said Ben Adams, chairman of the district’s Special Education Commission, whose disabled son attends a regular elementary school in Westwood.

The case began in 1993, after the mother of a South-Central high school student, Chanda Smith, took her predicament to Robert Myers’ law firm. Chanda had failed 10th grade twice despite her mother’s pleas that she be given special tutoring for a learning disability.

Myers teamed up with the American Civil Liberties Union to file a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all 65,000 disabled students in the district. The suit accused the district of committing a series of errors in special education, ranging from bookkeeping snags to placement glitches.

Mindful of a similar suit in New York City, which that district fought and lost, the Los Angeles district opted to try to settle.

Outside consultants from Sacramento and Pennsylvania spent a year evaluating all aspects of the district’s program and submitted a two-volume report that was long on criticism but short on concrete solutions. The intent, they said, was to agree on the problems and then phase-in changes over the next five years.

The series of three hearings--which continue tonight at Banneker Special Education Center in South Los Angeles--are intended to begin the process of fleshing out how and when those changes will occur. Although the consultants visited dozens of schools and coordinated a parent survey, the hearings are the first opportunity for widespread public input on the issue.

Still, as was true at the first hearing Monday at district headquarters, those who spoke Tuesday suggested few specific changes. Instead, most of them focused on problems with the process, criticizing the consent decree as created by consultants operating in a vacuum.

Already two groups have threatened legal action if the district does not insert their perspectives into the consent decree. The California Council on the Blind wants assurances that the district’s school for the blind will not be closed. A group of parents and advocates calling itself RESPECT has asked for two extra months to provide grass-roots input.

The school board plans to meet in closed session to incorporate its findings from the hearings before submitting the document to the courts. Following the judge’s review, the decree calls for creating a team of district officials and consultants to carry out the reforms.