Special education programs thrive in Columbia

COLUMBIA — Two years ago, Rebecca Lawver and her husband, Mark, had trouble understanding their daughter Grace.

“My husband and I noticed around the time she was three,” Lawver said. “We couldn’t really understand a lot of what she was saying.”

Grace, who turns six this month, has a speech and language disability and has difficulty articulating sounds that include k, g, s, f and sh.

According to Lynn Barnett, assistant superintendent in the Columbia Public Schools Special Services department, approximately 2,500 students in the district, like Grace, qualify for special education programs because of disabilities like behavior disorders or trouble in speech or learning.

Friends told Lawver, 31, not to worry about Grace, that it was normal for children her age to be a little slow in developing language skills. However, Lawver was still concerned.

“You get this gut feeling, you know?” she said. “I just kept pushing the issue with the school district to test her.”

Grace was first tested in Nebraska, where the Lawvers lived two years ago. She had just started receiving speech therapy when they relocated to Columbia so Lawver could work on a doctorate in agricultural education at MU. Before they left, Lawver talked to their pediatrician, who referred them to an ear, nose and throat specialist, who identified her speech disability.

When the Lawvers started looking for houses in Columbia, they considered the different teachers and special education programs at each school.

According to Barnett, all of the schools in Columbia provide services for children with disabilities, although children with more severe disabilities might be placed at another campus.

“Knowing there were 19 or 20 elementary schools, we wanted to make sure the district had a good program for the speech and language problems she was having,” said Lawver.

Although they searched the Internet for information, what was most helpful was talking to people from Columbia, particularly those in Lawver’s doctorate program, who suggested some of the best schools in the area.

The Lawvers, who chose Shepard Boulevard Elementary, met with the special education coordinator and a speech language pathologist to determine the best learning environment for Grace. Shepard has four learning specialists on staff, two of whom concentrate on speech and language.

“Whenever we have a child we feel has some concerns, we sit down and see what kind of interventions we can put in place that might make that situation get better,” said JoNetta Weaver, principal of Shepard.

Although the Lawvers brought in test results from Nebraska, most parents will have their child tested by the school district to see if the child will qualify for a special education program. Parents must give consent before their child can be tested, although a teacher may recommend it.

Parents that want their child to be tested can go to the child’s teacher, principal, or any other school professional.

“They can make what’s called a parent referral and go to their school and say they’re concerned about their child,” said Barnett.

Students can be tested for speech disabilities like Grace’s, autism, hearing impairment, mental retardation, orthopedic impairment and other learning disabilities.

In Missouri, for children between the ages of three and five who are not kindergarten-age eligible, most of the testing is done through observation of communication skills and cognitive, social and adaptive behavior.

For children over the age of five, Missouri has two types of qualification tests. One way is that a school psychologist would give the child both an IQ test and a standardized achievement test. Depending on the discrepancy between the two, the child could qualify for special education.

“For example, if their IQ score was completely average, it’d be 100,” said Erica Lembke, an assistant professor of the MU College of Education. “The achievement score would have to be lower than 72.5.”

Weaver has found that parents are sometimes surprised that their child may not qualify for special programs.

“The thing that’s a little complicated is that we need to have a big enough discrepancy,” she said. The child may simply need a little bit of extra attention by the teacher, for example.

The second type of qualification test, Response to Intervention, is not used by Columbia public schools. With RTI, a child would still be administered an IQ test and often times still take an achievement test, but an adaptive behavior scale is also used. This scale might more accurately measure, for example, a child with mental retardation who has trouble with social situations. This would show what “deficits” the child might have in certain areas, said Lembke.

Because achievement tests play a large role in deciding whether a child qualifies for special education, this can become an issue of contention. According to Lembke, a standardized test is not always the best indicator, because, for example, a student might not get a question correct if they do not have prior knowledge that would help them understand the question.

Giving an example of a question that raised some issues in the past, Lembke described a picture of a baby lamb. Students had to finish the sentence like “This baby animal is a ________” in order to get the question right.

“Sometimes the questions are written so that a student, for example, from an urban area, might not be able to answer those questions,” said Lembke.

These students may not have ever seen a lamb before, so they could not correctly identify the animal because they were not exposed to this prior knowledge.

Often, this poses a problem by potentially misidentifying a student as needing special education. According to Lembke, it is a large issue for black students, and black males in particular. The RTI method is supposed to help with the issue of bias, so if a child does not have the background or does not use English as his first language, RTI data from the classroom will help correctly place the student.

According to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the state collects data from school districts, so if the data shows a large percentage of black students are qualifying for special education when there is only a small population of blacks at the school, the state will monitor the district until it carries out a plan to take care of the issue.

“I think we still have work to do in a lot of districts to get better about that,” Lembke said.

Lawver has not seen any problems with the way Columbia schools assign special education students. The program, for her, “has been great.”

“Grace is doing much better than she was a year ago,” she said. “Part of it is learning how to use her tongue and her mouth.”

She described how Grace sits in the bathtub and practices her sounds, for example, holding her throat while saying “guh, guh, guh” to make a hard “g” sound.

The only thing Lawver would like to see change is the number of progress reports. Although there are two parent-teacher conferences every year and an IEP conference, she wishes there was a monthly report.

An IEP, or individualized education program, is mandated by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which not only lists the child’s disabilities, but also sets attainable goals for the child to reach by the end of the school year. Although the IEP can mandate that a child may use a calculator on a non-calculator math test or needs to go to a special education room during reading time, for example, Columbia public schools like to try and keep students in the regular classroom as much as possible.

According to Weaver, a child might go to a speech room for 30 minutes a week, but Shepard, along with other schools, will not take a child out of the regular classroom unless the environment is not meeting the needs of that particular child.

Grace is in the regular classroom most of the time but goes down to the speech room twice a week. Her regular classroom teacher, Lawver said, knows she has some issues with speech and tries to work with her as well.

The Lawvers, who have an older son without a speech disability, said their experience with both special education and regular programs in Columbia had been positive.

“Everyone in Columbia’s just seemed to really care about our kids,” said Lawver, smiling.

Find out more about Missouri special education the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education Web site, dese.mo.gov.

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