A Dream Not Denied
“Just a Normal Girl”
At 6:30 a.m. Katie Apostolides rises, and readies herself for the day ahead. She arrives on the Becker College campus for her course on principles of teaching at 8:20 a.m. She is more than an hour early.
Forty-five minutes before class begins, she is in Professor Nina Mazloff’s office to pepper her with questions about what they will cover for the day, whether she will have to take notes and if there will be any homework. Ms. Apostolides, 23, likes to say of herself, “I am just a normal girl with a lifelong story.” But that is really just another way of explaining that she has Down syndrome.
In her determined quest to have a normal college experience, she is at the forefront of a wave of cognitively disabled students who are demanding, and gaining, a place on campuses nationwide. Ms. Apostolides was accepted at Becker, a small liberal arts school with campuses in Leicester and Worcester, Mass., three years ago through regular admissions. She attends regular classes and lives in a coed dorm.
While she is among a small number of students with Down syndrome to have such a completely integrated education, there are dozens of others in programs that place cognitively disabled students in regular classrooms and sometimes in dormitories. The Web site ThinkCollege.net, a database on postsecondary schooling financed by the United States Department of Education, has information on 106 programs and experts say that number is growing fast.
The opening of college campuses comes as an outgrowth of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act of 1975. That law mandated that public schools educate children of all intellectual abilities and, whenever possible, in regular classrooms with same-age peers.
Now, coming of age expecting full inclusion from kindergarten through 12th grade, students and their parents are asking to graduate to similar opportunities. By law, children with disabilities are entitled to a free public education until age 21. Until recently, that mostly meant an extended stay in special-education classrooms at a public high school, but recent clarifications of the law have allowed states to use money earmarked for lower education for appropriate postsecondary programs instead.
Colleges are discovering that teaching students with cognitive delays or mental retardation is the next frontier. These new students are far more challenging than those with physical or learning disabilities. Colleges must struggle not just with how students learn but with the limits on what they can absorb.
Parents and educators pressing for inclusion say they are committed out of practical concerns as well. People with cognitive disabilities have abysmal rates of participation in the workplace, and when they do get jobs, they tend to hold entry-level positions, like fast-food clerk and custodial aide. But studies commissioned by the National Down Syndrome Society have shown that the quality and quantity of jobs increase with postsecondary education.
Postsecondary programs for the cognitively disabled vary substantially; some are more inclusive than others, some lead to a certificate or associate’s degree, others don’t.
Some advocates are designing programs to address four basic needs: employment training, socialization, independent-living skills and academic growth in order to assess what works best for this new crop of students. Through a mix of remedial reading and writing courses, exposure to creative experiences like drawing and acting and, eventually, more challenging coursework, information is being gathered that will be used to develop program models that can be used across the country.
Source: Leslie Kaufman for the New York Times, November 5, 2006. To read the full story, go to The New York Times (www.nytimes.com).
Students on the Spectrum
Valerie Kaplan has an aptitude for math, and scored a perfect 1600 on her SAT. When her high school classmates applauded the announcement at lunch, she was pleased. But less obvious signals – a raised eyebrow or impatient glance at a watch – elude her. In an advanced course at Carnegie Mellon that problem caused classmates to sideline her in group projects. And during a critical meeting to win approval for her customized major, electronic art, she intently circled the freckles on her arm with a marker.
Miss Kaplan’s behavioral quirks are agonizingly familiar to students with an autism spectrum disorder. Simply put, their brains are wired differently. Children with classic autism have language delays or deficits and difficulty relating to others; they display rigid, often obsessive behaviors; deviation from routine disturbs them. Some are mentally retarded. Those with milder conditions on the spectrum – Asperger’s is one of them – exhibit some or all of these characteristics to lesser degrees. But Asperger’s is also distinguished by average or above average intelligence, an early acuity with language and singular passions. People like Miss Kaplan have a disability, but to others they can seem merely gifted, or difficult, or odd.
A top expert estimates that one in every 150 children has some level of spectrum disorder, a proportion believed to be rising steeply. With earlier and better intervention, more of these children are considering college, and parents, who have advanced them through each grade with intensive therapies and unrelenting advocacy, are clamoring for the support services to make that possible. It is said that twenty-five years ago, the stereotype view was that these kids were not very bright and not college material. Today, changes are rippling across campuses as colleges scramble to figure out how to accommodate this new, growing population of disabled students.
Community colleges are particularly unsettled. Scores of students are turning up, hesitant about their ability to handle four years of college. “Colleges call us all the time in a panic, and the calls are increasing,” says Lorraine E. Wolf, clinical director of disability services at Boston University and a consultant on the topic.
Some assume conventional learning-disability programs will do for such students. But that’s a mistake, experts say. Students on the spectrum need help chopping course loads into manageable bites. They need to learn how to act appropriately in class and with social issues.
“That’s a little bit different from what administrators normally do,” says Richard Allegra, director of professional development for the Association on Higher Education and Disability. “If a blind student needs books in Braille, they know how to do that.”
Colleges are devising programs that try to integrate students on the spectrum into the academic and social fabric of the campus. At Keene State College, in New Hampshire, fellow students act as “social navigators.” (Their assignment: change their charges’ “outsider” status by introducing them to their friends.) The mentors get $10 an hour (and sometimes course credit in psychology) by helping students on the spectrum make small talk, and date. Some 50 undergraduates have participated in the program, which Professor Larry Welkowitz, who helped create the program, calls “the single best intervention – I just know it because of how I have seen their lives change.” In turn, he says, the mentors develop new understanding. “We’re learning about ourselves,” Professor Welkowitz says.
Colleges are legally required to ensure equal opportunity for academically qualified students. Accepted adjustments include note-takers, extra time for tests, and single dorm rooms for students for whom normal noise or the flicker of a fluorescent light amounts to sensory overload. Social skills training, however, is assistance of a personal nature and is, therefore above and beyond what is considered to be appropriate support at the college level.”
Complicating the situation is a scarcity of data on best practices in a college environment. Jane Thierfeld Brown , director of student support services at the University of Connecticut School of Law, is helping to create a pilot program for the University of Minnesota and Boston University that will assess its own success rate. “Once we can prove the program increases the students’ graduation and retention rates,” she says, “it can be replicated at other colleges.”
Source: Abigail Sullivan More, New York Times, November 5, 2006. To read the full story, go to The New York Times (www.nytimes.com).
