Parents call for special ed reform

Parents appealed to the Yuma  Elementary School District 1 governing board Tuesday to make some critical changes they say will enhance special education programs.

Joseph Michaud, a parent of a child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder at Castle Dome Middle School, said his son is in eighth grade but cannot properly write or punctuate.

Michaud said his son is not getting the special tutoring he requires. He asked that the governing board do an in-house inspection and review all aspects of the special education program. He added that he believed in the past two decades, the community has "intentionally dumbed downed schoolchildren."

Sharon Schroeder is the mother of a 13-year-old son who has autism spectrum disorder and attends the Ron Watson School.

Schroeder said she was informed that her son's teacher does not have proper certification. She said she was told that this teacher can continue to teach for the remainder of the year but must be certified to teach autistic children by the end of the year.

Also, at Rolle School, there is a long-term substitute teacher with a degree in marine biology who is teaching autistic children. This type of occurrence happens over and over again, Schroeder said.

District 1 does not know what to do with special education children, Schroeder maintained. They are placed in a particular school without teachers who have attained Highly Qualified standards, and the district is not providing the necessary equipment, she said.

Even if there are Highly Qualified teachers available, the district places too many students into a single classroom without proper support and as a result, those teachers experience burnout after a year and leave the district, she said.

"What I'd like to see is more 'mainstreaming' where special education students are integrated into regular classrooms. Also, special education students could attend a home school near where they live because the district now just picks a school for them and it's frequently a long ways from home. And often the school changes from year to year, and these children don't do well with change."

Previous requests to provide special equipment have been ignored by the district, Schroeder added. She appealed to the board to consider a series of workshops to involve teachers, administrators and parents to provide proper education for these children. If it is not done now to allow them to reach their full potential, she said, these children will become more of a tax burden on the community and the state in the future.

But Superintendent Darwin Stiffler said District 1 unequivocally has an exemplary record of compliance with the state board's special education needs regardless of recent allegations.

However, Stiffler said, he never begrudges a parent for advocating for their child and he wished that more would do so.

As far as the concept of mainstreaming or inclusion, where special education students regardless of their academic level are included with age level peers in as many activities as possible, that is not the current model that District 1 follows and it would be a large-scale change, he said.

At last month's board meeting, it was noted that decisions for District 1 special education are made by evaluation teams of parents as well as faculty and despite best efforts, some parents are disappointed with a team's decision. In the past two years, only five complaints have been made against special education; after a review of each, the district was found in compliance in all cases.