No Child Left Behind

“No Child Left Behind” and IDEA may be raising expectations of college-bound Tourettes and Aspbergers sufferers
By
James Ottavio Castagnera
Special to Disability Compliance for Higher Education
Under the federal “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) law and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), children with Tourettes and Aspbergers syndromes often are being mainstreamed into traditional K-12 classrooms. Both conditions bring with them, to widely varying degrees from child to child, the potential for disruptive behavior. In conversation with one teacher in a Greater Philadelphia elementary school, I was told that, “When you see a class of kids walking down a hallway these days, it’s common to see four or five adults accompanying them,” She added, “Look inside a typical classroom and it almost looks like a PTO meeting, there are so many aides involved in handling the so-called ‘mainstreamed’ children with Aspbergers and similar disorders.”
Often, she informed me, these children are in fact highly disruptive, making the difficult job of teaching children even more daunting, perhaps at times impossible, for the typical classroom teacher. But try removing such children from the classroom setting, and a lawsuit will likely be the parents’ response to the struggling school district.
In preparing this column I learned of one beleaguered teacher telling her colleagues, “Look, I know ‘Joey’ should be retained. But I don’t want any second grade teacher to have to go through what I’ve been through with him this year.”
The costs --- financial and emotional --- of implementing “No Child Left Behind” and IDEA, and the controversy about their efficacy, like these laws themselves, are not going away any time soon. Meanwhile, the Joeys and Janies being pushed through the K-12 system with these conditions are coming our way. Some are on campus already. Many times their parents demand the same level of services their children received during their first 12 years of education. They also often demand a high level of institutional and fellow-student tolerance for anti-social and disruptive behavior. What accommodations are really reasonable is often a tough call for disability-service professionals and faculty alike.
Even Aspberger and Tourettes sufferers themselves may have difficulty deciding which accommodations to seek, as explained by writer Mitzi Walsh on the Tourettes Syndrome Association’s website [http://www.tsa-usa.org], “Talking about classroom accommodations does bring up one knotty problem,… your level of comfort in revealing that you have TS. For many people, there’s no choice. Their tics are loud or easily visible, and it’s surely better to explain that it’s a medical issue than to let others come to ill-informed conclusions. If your tics are relatively minor, however, or if they are well-controlled with medication for now, you do have a choice. It’s a decision only you can make.”
On August 3, 2006, the U.S. Department of Education announced final regulations aimed at enforcing IDEA Part B, which includes Tourettes and Aspbergers in its purview. “This is a tremendous victory,” crowed Board Chair Monte Redman of the Tourettes Syndrome Association. Under the new regs, Tourettes sufferers are classified as “Other Health Impaired.”
How the IDEA classifies a condition can significantly impact the levels of support services, as well as the classroom placements, of those burdened by the condition. Tourettes students have frequently been classed in the “Emotionally Disturbed” category for NCLB and IDEA purposes, resulting in treating them primarily as behavioral problems. The reclassification under the new regs will enable even more “children with TS to remain in the general education setting,” according to a press release from the Tourettes Syndrome Association.
Whether this outcome is best for Tourettes and Aspberger children and/or for their “normal” classmates, it guarantees that more such students will be college-bound, since experts identify absence from the mainstream in K-12 as a major impediment to college matriculation for such students.
Will such students, if disruptive in college classrooms, require special consideration in light of this reclassification?
Very little legal precedent is available for guidance. A decade ago Boston University won a jury verdict in a widely-observed and publicized case brought against it by a young women who withdrew for medical reasons and was subsequently denied readmission. The medical withdrawal was occasioned by side effects of her Tourettes medication. The faculty of the university’s Simmons College had found her unfit for readmission to continue with its social-work program.
Given advances in medication and advances in the law, Tourettes and Aspbergers may be on the cutting edge of a disabilities issue ripe for revisiting by federal agencies and the courts.