Why CDC classrooms for students with special needs are problematic | Opinion

For the second time in the last four years, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision about the use of segregated classrooms for children with special needs. In Tennessee, these classrooms are commonly known as“comprehensive development classrooms,” CDC for short.

The first case, LH v. Hamilton County, involved a second-grade student with Down syndrome. His school tried to remove him to a CDC classroom at a nearby school. The second case, Knox County v. M.Q., issued last week, involved an even younger child, kindergarten, who has autism. The school tried to place him in a CDC classroom for the majority of the day.

Both times, the Sixth Circuit accepted the school districts’ contentions that they meant well, and that in their minds, the CDC classrooms offered instructional advantages not available in the regular classroom. But that stands in contrast to decades of research showing that students with disabilities learn better in regular education classrooms through exposure to children without disabilities.

An admittedly imperfect analogy is teaching English to non-English-speaking children: if placed with only non-English-speaking kids, the progress will be painfully slow and may never work. Instead, being immersed with English-speaking children, and having aides to help them, allows faster progress. It is that power of immersion, peer modeling, and feeling of belongingness that the CDC classrooms, no matter how well intended or staffed, cannot deliver.

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So why did we build them?

So, why do these CDC classrooms persist as often as they do? While the answer is complex, two chief factors are “we have always done it that way,” and, to a lesser extent, there do exist rare circumstances where a child’s needs cannot be met in a regular education classroom. The problem is allowing the exception to become the rule—the “tail” of the CDC classroom wagging the “dog” of regular education classrooms.

With apologies to the movie “Field of Dreams,” there is truth to “if we build it, they will come.”

Once the CDC classes are created and staffed, there’s an expectation that they must be filled. Why else build them? And once they are filled with students having common characteristics, CDC becomes an accepted practice rather than a rare occurrence.

Schools compliment themselves to parents, accentuating the CDC room or teacher in spite of decades of research suggesting otherwise. Of course, it is that separate practice through CDC (special attention away from the others) that actually delays these students’ growth.

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The difficulty getting out

Once inside the CDC, most experts find that children are likely to maintain that placement throughout their educational lives. School districts sometimes argue that children may pass from the CDC classroom to a more mainstream classroom, and back again, but usually that door “swings one way”: once in CDC, children usually stay there. Thus, the gap between children with special needs in CDC, and children educated in regular education classes, widens every single year.

This gap is not a matter of opinion, but shown through statistical data across 50 years since the passage of the inclusion law in the 1970s (the IDEA). Not a single research study suggests that separate classrooms provide superior educational outcomes for children with disabilities.

In the L.H. case, the Sixth Circuit found Hamilton County’s ideas about separate classrooms to be “bizarre,” while in M.Q., it found Knox County’s “stance hews closer to an unwillingness to mainstream.” Small group settings, the Court said, represent a hallmark of today’s regular education classroom, not just a CDC classroom. Small groups are usually teacher-led, sometimes paraprofessional-led, and occasionally student-directed.

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A key question to ask

Are regular education classrooms appropriate for every single child with special needs? There are exceptions, but for the vast majority of students the answer is often “yes.” The key question for parents to ask (teachers too) is whether the beneficial supports purportedly offered in the CDC classroom can also be delivered in a regular education classroom? In law, this is called “porting the supports” to regular education.

Through that lens, the answer is usually, “yes, they can be,” as they could have been in L.H and M.Q. If school suggests, “we don’t do it that way,” or “the regular classrooms just don’t have those supports,” or “the CDC would better meet the needs,” those are all red flags.

Moving children from CDC rooms to regular education classrooms does represent a paradigm shift. Dr. Kate McLeod usually works with school districts to create more inclusive settings with existing cost structures. In M.Q., she testified for M.Q. about how she would create a virtual map of how the district’s human resources are being allocated—“their staff, their general ed, special ed, paraprofessionals.”

Then she would examine the percentages of segregation, and the corresponding achievement data for those students. She and the district come together to discuss how to use the existing resources more inclusively. Surprisingly to some, this is often the more economical model.

The overuse of CDC classrooms for children with higher needs, such as autism or intellectual disabilities, must be re-examined in Tennessee school districts. Too often, they are used as a matter of convenience, propped up by naked plaudits of offering “small group,” “intensive learning,” and “special resources.” In truth, children more often achieve better outcomes by including them in their natural environments, with non-disabled peers, a community of different learners, no different than society itself.

Justin Gilbert is an East Tennessee attorney who works on inclusion cases. He represented L.H. and M.Q. www.schoolandworklaw.com.

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: CDC classrooms for students with special needs are problematic