Education Students

Mainstreaming special education students into classrooms remains a top concern for many teachers, according to a recent Howard County Education Association poll.The poll, taken of elementary, middle and high school teachers during this school year, also indicated that class size, curriculum overload, separate ninth-grade areas and four-period days worried teachers.But the overwhelming concern was the inclusion of special education students in regular classrooms. Teachers feel they have not gotten the staffing, training or planning necessary to effectively mainstream special education students.

There is still much we do not know about Dayvon Green, the University of Maryland, College Park student who police say fatally shot one of his roommates, Stephen Alex Rane, and seriously wounded another outside their off-campus apartment before taking his own life on Tuesday. Mr. Green, a promising graduate engineering student from the Baltimore area, reportedly was under treatment for mental illness, and though the precise nature of his condition has not been confirmed, investigators believe it may have been a factor in this horrible crime.

Kevin Jaros, a 15-year-old with multiple disabilities, needs an escort to find his way to the school bus. To teach him about the human digestive system, his teacher, Tammy Wolanin, created the stomach, intestines and other parts in colors and textures Kevin can recognize and then stick into place on a model. He has to repeat the task over and over again to pass the alternative Maryland State Assessment -- also known as the alt-MSA -- the state's version of standardized testing for special education students.

One dreary spring morning, I entered Robert Moton Elementary as opera resounded through its halls, stirring my soul like never before. As a school psychologist with limited exposure to classical genres, I was startled but tremendously invigorated by this music. I then noticed some students bopping down the halls — also seemingly uplifted. I immediately sought out the assistant principal, a former music teacher who selects Moton's morning melodies, begging him to identify this inspiring music.

This isn't your parents' gym class: Alexis Skelos, 35 feet above the ground, slowly edges across a cable suspended between two telephone poles. The 15-year-old's knees buckle, and the cable shakes as she clutches one of a series of ropes hanging six feet apart from a wire suspended above her. "Lean left, lean left," yells teacher Mike Davey. Alexis' classmates watch nervously as she creeps across the 25-foot-long wire. Back on the ground, she smiles, then exhales. "It's scary, but I finished," she said.

Amanda Walker rolled a strike and three spares at bowling. Shawna Tragesar rolled two strikes. Andrew Sweeney made a backward throw into a floor basketball net. The three youths were participating in the first Inclusion Field Day, hosted by Westminster High School for special education students from the county's high schools. The 40-plus teenagers, with a range of disabilities, participated in 10 physical education activities that had been set up around Westminster's main gym. Teachers and student-helpers assisted the youths with volleyball, a hockey shoot, a target throw, scooter handball, golf, a parachute wave, keep it up, and scoop and shoot.

As a child, Christina Blackman spent summers riding ponies on a North Dakota farm not far from where her great-grandmother taught immigrant children how to read and write in a one-room schoolhouse. "In some ways, I feel I've inherited my teaching career," Blackman said yesterday in an emotional address to a roomful of educators who gathered to honor her as Baltimore County's Teacher of the Year 2001. Blackman, 33, has taught music to special education students at Battle Monument School in Dundalk for 11 years.

Acknowledging that many end up in special education because minor learning difficulties go untreated, Baltimore school officials are poised to begin a program to boost help to the city's struggling students.Under an agreement signed by the city and lawyers representing special education students, a team of professionals would be set up in each school to diagnose and treat a failing student's problem before he or she begins to fall behind.The school system hopes to reduce the city's huge special education population, among the highest in the nation.

A federal judge called city and state school officials into court yesterday to express his concerns that Baltimore's special education students won't receive the services they need amid leadership changes in the school system. City schools Chief Executive Officer Bonnie S. Copeland is stepping down this week, and most top administrative positions overseeing special education are vacant or filled with interim replacements. School system and state officials told the judge they will work together to ensure that services are provided.

In Baltimore city public schools, there's nothing special in special education. On the contrary, for the 17,000 boys and girls consigned to special education in the city, the program is nothing but a dumping ground for students who have problems learning by means of traditional teaching methods. The purpose of special education is to ensure that students who need something more than the instruction provided in regular classrooms will get the help they need to succeed in school. In Baltimore city schools, however, the reality is that special education is often no education at all.A new report, issued by Students First, a group advocating reforms in the city schools, describes a system that essentially writes off any student who proves difficult to teach or to discipline.

Margaret H. "Maggie" Rittler, an educator whose lifelong dream was teaching special-education students, died Aug. 3 of an aneurysm while on vacation on Cape Cod. The Cockeysville resident was 44. Mrs. Rittler was stricken while attending a movie and was taken to Cape Cod Hospital in Hynannis, Mass., where she died. The daughter of a military policeman and a registered nurse, Margaret Henry was born and raised in West Milford, N.J., where she graduated in 1986 from St. Dominic Academy.

This is National School Choice Week, an occasion that always makes me think back to 1976, when as a writer for my high school paper, I interviewed retiring Baltimore County schools Superintendent Joshua Wheeler. I asked Mr. Wheeler why our schools didn't require proficiency testing for graduation. "I know we're a great school system," I said diplomatically, "but even so, some of our kids graduate without being able to read and write. " Mr. Wheeler was an honest public servant, and I'll never forget his candid response: "Your question shows that you do not understand the purpose of the public education system.

Margaret Ann Wotthlie Curtis, career-long Baltimore County educator of special needs children, died Aug. 11 of cancer at Dove House in Westminster. She was 71. Born in Baltimore on Oct. 20, 1939, Mrs. Curtis grew up on Rogers Avenue, and graduated from the prestigious, all-female Western High School in 1957. She married Eugene Curtis the same year, and they raised their three sons in Reisterstown. Mrs. Curtis, affectionately known to her family and friends as "Peggy," began her education career as a cafeteria volunteer at Chatsworth Elementary School in 1975, one year after the Reisterstown school opened with Nancy S. Grasmick — who would later become the state superintendent — as its principal.

The often-contentious 26-year-old lawsuit that attempted to provide equality for Baltimore's special-education students but ultimately helped to change the course of the public school system is nearing an end after a federal judge agreed Monday to end his oversight. U.S. District Judge Marvin J. Garbis accepted an agreement from the school system and the Maryland Disability Law Center, which had filed suit in 1984 on behalf of several special-education students, saying they were not being offered adequate services.

B altimore schools CEO Andrés Alonso has presented the city board of school commissioners with a problem of both practical and philosophical import: How long should the city wait before deciding to close charter schools that clearly aren't up to the job they were intended to do? The issue came to light at a meeting of the city school board last week, when Mr. Alonso recommend revoking the charter of the independently run, publicly financed Dr. Rayner Browne Academy, an elementary/middle school in West Baltimore that is now in its third year of operation.

Washington is proposing rules, restrictions and the creation of an entire federal agency to stop dumb consumers from repeating the mortgage disaster or something just as bad. Maryland has another idea. Make dumb consumers smart. Don't let kids out of school without a basic understanding of interest rates, bank fees and scams that will persist no matter how baby-proof Congress tries to make the system. State officials are about to reveal proposals for personal-finance instruction that could be in the classroom by next fall.

For a while this year, there seemed to be some hope that the city schools' 18,000 special education students might begin to get the kinds of services they need -- services that taxpayers are already paying for. Once again, however, the bureaucratic morass at North Avenue seems defeated by simple demands, or perhaps oblivious to their importance.As a result, U.S. District Judge Marvin Garbis has declared Superintendent Walter G. Amprey in civil contempt of court, with the threat of making the order criminal.

Harford has agreed to be one of two school districts in the state to launch a pilot program next fall to integrate special education students into neighborhood schools.The other school district that will take part in the program, aimed at studying the best ways to educate disabled students, is Queen Anne's county.In Harford, special education students from two school areas will attend neighborhood schools under the pilot program approved by the county Board of Education Monday. A planning committee will choose one elementary and one middle school in Harford by January for the program.

Malcolm Graham Vinzant Jr., a founding faculty member of what is now the Community College of Baltimore County at Catonsville and who later rehabilitated houses and owned a popular Cross Street Market cheese stall, died Thursday from complications of a stroke at a Winter Park, Fla., assisted-living facility. The Federal Hill resident was 78. Mr. Vinzant, the son of a federal government worker and a homemaker, was born in Laredo, Texas, and moved to Catonsville shortly after his birth.