The results are overcrowding and decline. "Y'all quit telling people about us, because we can't take any more children," she says with a smile, sitting in her office during the hectic break between class periods.
Despite that admonition, Mitchell is proud of her school's special-education program, especially the lengths school staff members go to in providing accommodations for children with impairments. For instance, she says, voice-activated computers.
Mark Graham
Ralph and Linda Long are critical of DISD's special-education program but realize that some schools--such as Hillcrest High School--have labored mightily to accommodate students such as their son Gene Michael, who suffers from cerebral palsy.
Mark Graham
Last year, the Texas Education Agency appointed a monitor, Cindy Michaels, to oversee special education in Dallas--the only large Texas city to receive such scrutiny.
Related Content
More About
There are about 130 children diagnosed with disabilities at Franklin, says Mitchell, who believes that most of them can be mainstreamed into regular education. One major misconception of special education, she says, is that it consists mostly of mentally disabled children. But the principal recalls a bright child who had difficulty concentrating on the small multiple-choice bubbles used in standardized tests and a regional math and science derby. So teachers at Franklin got creative. "We had to enlarge the Scantron sheets," Mitchell says. "Probably, this kid would not have been able to compete in the math and science competition" were it not for the accommodation. "We are becoming more and more sophisticated," she says.
Mitchell leads me down the maze of hallways to a room where two DEC team members are conducting a training session for about 10 special-education teachers. Here Jan Deaton, the area specialist, is telling instructors to consider every part of a disability when mapping out a disabled child's education plan. If a seventh-grade student reads at a second-grade level, that deficit will affect science, social studies, and math, she says.
Then she offers a cautionary tale of how not to serve a disabled child. "If there's a child who runs all over town to the movies and to his grandmother's house," Deaton says, "and then we put him in a little yellow bus that stigmatizes him, be careful doing that." She exhorts the need for technology to aid disabled students. "DISD offers less than average in [special education] technology statewide," she says. "But technology could be a squishy pencil for a child who doesn't grip well. It could be a slanted desktop."
After Deaton, another staff member talks about the necessity of preparing disabled students for independent living--even down to the art of dressing for an interview. "They've got to work," he says. "It's the real world." UPS, Target, and OfficeMax are companies that have hired DISD special-education students in the past, he says.
Afterward, I tell Deaton I'd like to visit a class where children with disabilities are mainstreamed into regular education, but she tells me I would be bored. When people in the past made the same request, Deaton recalls, she would "say OK and take them to a class. They'd say, 'Which are the special-education kids?'" Such invisibility, she says, is the whole point of inclusion. "We just don't put a brand on their forehead."
