Free The Things I Want Most by Richard Miniter Page A

and we had kept our other children out of the public schools as much as we could, so the entire system of “special education” was well beyond our experience. We started from the naive belief that since our local public school district had classrooms and teachers and should know what they were doing with both, it was incumbent upon them to simply tell us what bus he had to get on, what his teachers name was, and then do what they had to do. In a couple of weeks we’d visit his teacher, find out how he was doing and what she wanted from us, and then follow up on his homework.
    â€œNo,” Sue’s sister Eileen, an experienced public school teacher, laughed when, after the first few days of the school year passed, Sue said something like that to her. “It’s just not that simple. He’s a special-needs child. They have to formulate an IEP first.”
    â€œWhat’s an IEP?”
    Eileen then took a deep breath and explained that there were new federal laws involved, laws that required all children diagnosed as having “special needs” to be evaluated by a standing committee of the local school district called the Committee of Special Education. Then, in each case, the laws further required an Individual Educational Plan or IEP be developed, approved, and filed under complex guidelines for appeal.
    â€œHuh,” Sue said, puzzled. “Why don’t they just test him and put him in the right class?”
    â€œBecause the IEP has to stipulate in writing the resources they will make available to him first. The school system doesn’t want to get sued by parents who don’t like the plan. They are sued all the time over IEPs by parents who want some form of extra-special treatment for special-needs kids.”
    â€œHow long does an IEP take?”
    â€œUsually not long. It’s just that right now Mike is probably standing in line. The number of special-needs children is constantly growing. The definition of handicaps is very elastic, and there are no real criteria. We’re not talking here about dyslexies or kids in wheelchairs any longer. Parents of overweight children are now demanding that their children be classified as handicapped and be given an IEP, parents of bored kids or slow learners are going out and having their children diagnosed as having attention deficit disorder (ADD) and demanding classification, and it goes on and on.”
    â€œOh.”
    And in fact, after Labor Day came and went, The Harbour Program came through; Joanne ran around in another busy series of meetings that got Mike placed. Everybody lives in some local school district, of course, but in New York State there is also an entity called the Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES, for short. BOCES extends over many school districts and began as centralized vocational training, but eventually expanded into other areas, particularly special education. In a nearby town, BOCES occupied one wing of an elementary school, where it maintained a therapist, secretarial staff, and several classes for special-needs children.
    Mike’s IEP called for him to be placed in one of these, a 1:4:2 class.
    As Joanne explained, 1:4:2 is the ratio of teachers to students to teacher aides. One teacher, four students, two teacher aides.This was fairly puzzling to Sue and me. Although we didn’t know each other then, we both remember St. Patrick’s parish school in Brooklyn, where the teacher-student ratio was as high as 1:93. One Dominican nun to ninety-three students, and everybody learned to read and write.
    Why did they need three adults for four children?
    At first we thought it was for intensive instruction—that all of these resources would bring Mike up to the proper academic level, or at least to the best level he could attain.
    But the first thing it got him was tied to a chair.
    When Mike came home upset on the afternoon of the second school day, Sue got the story out