New Day for the Handicapped

Now they will go to school with everyone else

The TV camera zooms in on an athletic-looking young man with wispy blond hair. He begins to speak--and the effort is as painful to the viewer as it is for him "They told my parents I'd never live past three," he says, his face contorted by the struggle to form the words. "But here I am." Pause. "They told my parents that I'd never talk, but I talked at five. They said I'd never be able to drive, but after nine years of training my body"--he pants with the effort of speaking--"I can drive a car." Then he smiles--a triumphant grimace of a smile. "And now I'm getting married in three months."

His name is Jimmy, and he is a victim of cerebral palsy. Then there is Suzanne, a bright 16-year-old deaf girl filmed as she experiments with test tubes in a chemistry lab and learns how to rappel on a tree in an outdoor class. Suzanne's speech, which sounds to the untrained ear like a record played at the wrong speed, requires dubbing on the screen. And there's Lisa, a severely retarded eight-year-old with multiple handicaps. For her, just learning to eat with a spoon is a major educational triumph.

They are the handicapped, brought from the obscurity of small, isolated institutions and private homes into the glare of Including Me, a television special being presented this week on 197 Public Broadcasting Service stations, plus a few commercial channels, all over the U.S. The hour-long program is an effort to publicize a new national law, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. It requires that handicapped children be given a free public education, as often as possible by "mainstreaming" them with normal children in regular classrooms. The legislation begins to go into effect this October, though schools will have until next September to develop the bulk of their programs. An estimated 8 million handicapped children will be affected, a million of whom have never been educated at all.

Including Me profiles six children who either have been mainstreamed like Suzanne, or, like Lisa, still receive individual attention. One also hears the voices of parents who despair that their children will ever receive a proper public education. "These quality programs exist in reality in only a few places, while hundreds of thousands of children are totally neglected," reports Narrator Patricia Neal, herself once paralyzed by a stroke. The program ends with a plea to see that the act is properly implemented ("Talk to your P.T.A., principals, to the school board"). After the film, 109 of the stations are to broadcast follow-ups in which special education teachers, legislators and parents of the handicapped will be available to answer phone-in questions.

The schools shown in the film are mainly in Massachusetts, where a bill to provide equal education for the handicapped was put into effect in 1974, becoming the model for the federal act. Since that Massachusetts bill became law, says Michael Daly, deputy commissioner of the state's department of education, the system has fairly successfully absorbed 50,000 students who need special education.

Most of them are still being taught in separate classrooms. In Boston, though, Charlie Flynn and Mary O'Brien, special education consultants, have put 20 seriously handicapped students from kindergarten through third grade into regular city classrooms--at no substantial increase in expense, they argue, over that of educating normal children. All but a few attend the handsome William M. Trotter School in Roxbury, a school with a large staff that is even equipped with an elevator to transport children in wheelchairs.

On the first day of school last week, handicapped children were busily working away in Teacher Barbara Fagone's first-grade classroom. Kimberly, 8, a good-humored black girl, suffers from severe seizures and motion impairment.

Four years ago, she was considered "beyond help." Now she is making progress in a regular class. Lisa, 7, a slight hydrocephalic child, practiced her addition near by. When she first came to Trotter last year, she could not even hold a pencil. "If they were stuck in a hole somewhere, there's no way they could ever make it," says Barbara Fagone, who has been teaching handicapped children in her regular class for three years. How do her normal students react? "We found out last year that they're curious for exactly 20 minutes. Then it's over."

At the Joseph P. Keefe Technical High School in Framingham, 200 of the school's 1,000 students are handicapped. Of these, 140 students--55 of them deaf--are in regular technical classes. Says Robert Leonard, special needs director: 'Our goal is to make sure kids have sufficient skills to make a living, to go out there and take a crack at it like everyone else."

Under Office of Education regulations, the term handicapped includes not only the blind and the deaf, but victims of crippling diseases and of emotional disorders. Naturally, some parents of unhandicapped students worry that the overall quality of education will suffer from this new kind of integration. For their part, many educators fret about the high costs entailed in training teachers to deal with the handicapped. Both the Trotter and Keefe schools, for instance, can provide the handicapped with special aids that many schools in Massachusetts, and elsewhere in the country, cannot afford.

Lack of adequate federal funding for special education programs, in fact, is a primary concern of most states, and the National Education Association as well. "The act has wonderful goals, which we fully support, but the money isn't there to do the job and do it right," says NEA Official John Sullivan. While the start-up costs of the program have been estimated at $4 billion to $5 billion, funds authorized by Congress total only $387 million for the current school year and $775 million for the 1978-79 year. The states or local school districts, most of them already suffering from a shortage of funds, have to make up the difference somehow.

At least one educator, Massachusetts' Michael Daly, is confident that most of the fears of parents and teachers are overstated. "What the states are saying to the Federal Government is exactly what the local schools were saying to the state of Massachusetts a few years ago: 'It's impossible; we can't do it,' " says Daly. "But the fact is, we are doing it. Many of those kids are now in school with their brothers and sisters."

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