Anchor Lead:
One of the most difficult jobs to fill in public schools is that of the special education teacher. And within the field of special education, it is even more challenging to find teachers willing to instruct students with emotional behavior disorders. These students can pose a physical danger to themselves and the people around them. In the second part of our Learning Curve series on Special Education, KPLU's Jennifer Niessen talks to some teachers who work with these children and are determined to make a difference.

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Informative weblinks:

The Council for Exceptional Children

The President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education

Link to HR 1350, the BILL reauthorizing Special Education

Washington State's Office of Public Instruction/ Special Education

Jennifer Niessen (JN):

Special Ed Part Two: Emotional Challenges

At Whitman Middle School in Seattle's Crown Hill neighborhood Jannet McCraken Bland is concluding her 8th year teaching kids with emotional behavior disorders.

BLAND: "It takes a very unique personality to be able to not take it personally when kids are cussing at you and calling you names, the f.u's and so forth. That happens every day."

JN: McCracken Bland's classroom is a portable. It's cozy, complete with a pet mouse, a big goldfish and a rather large salamander the students get to feed worms to. She and a teaching aid oversee nine students. They are all boys. And most are on medication.

BLAND: "Some of them are on Ritalin type of medication and there's a newer medication that some are on for ADHD. And some of them are on very strong psycho-tropic drugs."

JN: Another thing many of her students have in common is a rough home-life.

BLAND: "I've got a student right now whose file is horrific. It's one of the worst tings I've seen. It IS one of the worst things I've seen outside of a textbook on child abuse. It's just amazing that this child can function in a classroom like mine."

JN: There are more than five thousand children is Washington State who have a serious behavioral disability and the odds are stacked against them. They fail more classes than students with other disabilities.
More than 50 percent wind up dropping out of high school. And those who do graduate are less likely to get a job.
Professor Steve Curtis heads up the Special Education department at Seattle University's teaching school. He says even though the numbers don't exist yet to prove it, more and more children with behavior disorders are coming up through the ranks.

CURTIS: "People may think behavior disorders are teenagers who are gang member delinquent types who brings guns into school. That's not what I'm talking about. We're talking about kids who are in kindergarten who are unmanageable. It's really hard for teachers to handle. For some reason that population is growing. It's really an enigma."

SFX: (sound of kids learning Chess)

JN: In McCracken Bland's classroom the nine students are learning how to play chess. It's hard to tell there is anything wrong. That's the goal of a class like this. Get the students to a point where they don't lash out, so their behavior is no longer in the way of their learning.
But there are days when students do act out and need to be restrained by the school's security guard. Months can go by without an incident, but heading into Winter and Summer breaks, students get stressed.

BLAND: "As much as they say they don't like school, they also don't want to be home. Home means boredom and being with you family all of the time, for a lot of these kids that's a terrible stress, so they don't like the end of the year and they get very worried and anxious and the behaviors start coming out."

JN: The approach McCracken Bland takes is based on patience and positive reinforcement. It's similar to a teaching philosophy called RE-ED, which is short for the Re-education of Emotionally Disturbed Children and Youth.
Re-ed was developed by a psychologist in the 1950's. Special education teacher Mike Oliver says Re-ed's core concepts work.

OLIVER: "One of them being the role of the teacher/counselor another one being joy, we need to bring joy into kids lives. The other one is the ecological framework, looking at the whole child and the community that they're in."

JN: A few years ago Oliver was teaching an Emotional Behavior class at Stevens elementary in Seattle and Laurie Kazanjian was Oliver's teaching assistant.

KAZANJIAN: "Watching Mike teach and employ this philosophy called re-ed in the classroom was really amazing. I saw transformations from September to June that were not Hollywood in their movement, but were pretty profound and startling. That compelled me to think that other people really need to see the story, or hear the story of these kids."

JN: Kazanjian spent a year getting parents and guardians to sign release forms so she could bring a video camera into Mike Oliver's class and make a documentary. It's called "Stormy Lessons". More than 60 hours of footage was shot. The crew captured candid and disturbing images of students flipping desks, cursing and acting out violently.
In this scene Oliver is consoling a boy who has a breakdown as a result of something as simple as being stumped by a crossword puzzle. Oliver brings the student into an empty room and holds the child close to him to prevent the student from hurting himself as he kicks the walls and floor.

SFX: (sound of student kicking the walls and floors)

OLIVER: "This has really gotten you hasn't it. I need you to be safe with your body. I don't what you to hurt yourself."

STUDENT: "Shoot me."

JN: Slumped in Oliver's arms, the child utters the words "shoot me". But after months of intense work, the documentary captures this student's transformation.

STUDENT: "Mr. Oliver said. He said that one day I would change and not make everything such a big deal. And I guess he was right about that."

JN: "Stormy Lessons" is believed to be the first of its kind and is still being edited.
One of the common links between Mike Oliver and Jannet McCracken Bland's classrooms is "time". If students don't move out of the district, these teachers are able to work with the kids for months, even years.
This might be threatened by a bill being reviewed by the Senate. The Federal law that created Special Education is being updated. Oliver says one of the proposed changes would make it easier to suspend and expel students with emotional disorders.

OLIVER: "Currently as it stands, you have to determine that the disability is a reason for why they're misbehaving, If it isn't then we can go with the regular course of suspensions or expulsions or whatever's necessary. What this bill does is it takes away the protection, where you don't have to link it (the bad behavior) to a child's disability. You can just say they were breaking the school rules and that's it."

JN: Oliver fears this change would result in a revolving doorÉshuttling students from school to school, never allowing them to stay in one classroom for very long. But school administrators strongly support being able to have the same discipline policies for ALL students.
Brenda Little, an attorney for the Seattle School District says students need to be prepared for life's rules outside of school.

LITTLE: "If you have children who know that their behavior is being excused because of a disability when they encounter the criminal justice system then they are kind of surprised that they are not getting the same breaks and advantages because of their disability."

JN: As schools work to create safe learning environments a debate is brewing over whether suspensions and expulsions do any good. Teachers say their ability to educate a class dramatically improves when just one disruptive student is removed. However, new research presented at a conference this spring at Harvard University shows flaws in this approach.
One research paper examining national data reveals states with higher suspension and expulsion rates also tend to have higher rates of juvenile incarceration. And another concludes strict discipline policies lead to lower achievement in reading writing and math... a trend all schools are trying to avoid.

Jennifer Niessen, KPLU News, Seattle