When a child in a normal class is referred for evaluation, to determine whether he or she needs special classes, the school must inform the parents within five days. Thirty days later, the school must provide the evaluation. All records must be made available to the parents. The Department of Education may then make recommendations about the child's placement. Parents who disagree with the recommendation have the opportunity to call for a reevaluation by different public evaluation clinics or by specialists.
If the parents are still not satisfied with the response of the school system, the courts will be given the final say regarding the placement of the child.
In the original draft of the law, Zeigler said, the final responsibility for the child's placement lay with the parents, provided that the presence of the child in question did not physically endanger the child's classmates. That plan was rejected as being too "circular," she said. "After a complex series of evaluations and reevaluations and referrals, that would have sent the decision right back to the place where the question originated," she said.
ALTHOUGH THE REGULATIONS for the implementation of the bill as it now stands may leave parents subject to the vagaries of a court uneducated about the issues of special education, there still will be a vast improvement over the present situation. With little or no legal control over placement, any decisions on placement have ultimately been a battle between parents and an individual school system. If the administrators of that school system decided, for whatever reason, that they could not handle the child, or that the child could not be appropriately educated by their school, the parent had to accept the decision. This bill will at least remove the final decision from the hands of the school system that may not want to be bothered with shuffling retarded students.
In the case of a normal child misassigned to a class for the retarded, the results are visibly tragic. For the severely retarded child who is denied the chance to enter a school system, the results can be equally tragic. School often has a normalizing and equalizing influence socially.
A mentally or emotionally handicapped child who is denied this part of normal life is sometimes left with next to nothing. The parents, faced with all-day care for a child who has no playmates and no social contact, often turn to care taking institutions as the only alternative.
Of the 45,000 additional students this bill is expected to provide for, many will come from institutions. They will be educated within the institution, or perhaps with new possibilities for public education, will have a chance to be released.
Under the provisions of the bill, no child will be forced out of an institution. That is, Kaufmann says, a child's physical or medical needs take precedence over education. However, the bill makes the Department of Education responsible for the education of institutionalized children.
ROBERT AUDETTE, chairman of the task force on the role of the institution in the enforcement of the bill, said that he hopes that this move toward education in the institutions will be another step towards getting as many handicapped children out of the institutions as possible. Audette, who is also assistant superintendent of Education, Training and Social Development at the Fernald State School in Waltham, gestured around at the dingy brick buildings of the school: "This is really no place for kids," he said.
He said that in the past society's conceptions of the retarded may have been as a supplementary work force, and he pointed to society's unwillingness to treat them as real people. However, he said that he felt that this attitude was changing fast. "You see F---- over there--he's one of our consumers really--but I'm going to try to get him onto our task force and see what he thinks about education."
Despite Kaufmann's disclaimers, some teachers in normal schools fear that this bill will force the removal of handicapped children from institutions in order to place them in regular schools. "They're going to close the institutions and flood our classes with handicapped kids, and we're overworked already," one teacher at a public school in Somerville said. Parents, too, were afraid at the outset that after they had struggled to get their children admitted to an acceptable custodial situation or provate school, they were going to be forced to withdraw them in favor of a public education.
A clause in the bill will protect the parents' rights to any kind of educational facility--public or private--that they wish, and to any institutionalization that may be required. As for the teachers' fears, the Department of Education's control of schooling within the institutions should preclude the immediate transferral of responsibilities onto the shoulders of the individual school systems.
However, the 45,000 extra children will have to be coped with in some way. And this could mean a strain on the school systems. The bill does provide money for the education of all these students. Approximately $10 million are provided for special education. The additional money will come from the state's general fund, which means that even if the education budget is cut, it will not be. The additional money, and some new provisions for the allocation of this money, should help ease some of the old educational oversights which were, no doubt, caused by a shortage of funds. And for those teachers who are nervous about encountering handicapped children for the first time, the Massachusetts Teachers' Association is planning on conducting seminars on dealing with special children.
THIS IS A COMPLEX BILL It was based on a Pennsylvania court ruling of 1971 guaranteeing education to all children. It seems that everyone had a hand in writing the Bartley-Daly bill, which may account for its complexity. At least 20 parents' groups--such as the Association for the Retarded Children, the Association for the Deaf, and the Association for the Brain-Injured Children--all were instrumental in pointing out particular problems that handicapped children faced, and making sure that their solutions were included.
Whether or not this bill revolutionized special education in Massachusetts largely depends on the implementation guidelines that are being set up now, in preparation for the bill's taking effect in 1974. Much also depends on educating public attitudes. Ending statutory labeling--which many parents hope will end or reduce stigmatization--will do nothing if teachers and school systems and especially other children are not made aware of the differences between handicapped people and themselves. Or, as Audette says, people must be allowed to realize that handicapped children are just "really people in slow motion."