a story about inclusion

from the NY Times

February 12, 2003
A Boy With Brain Damage, Happy in a Regular School
By JENNIFER MEDINA

Rocking slowly in his chair, Malcolm Thomas stared into
space, while the other 24 students in his seventh-grade
class began to share their poems. One classmate recited an
ode to climbing trees; another read verses about chasing
ice cream trucks.

The assignment was to write a poem recalling life at 9
years old. But Malcolm, his face blank, did not volunteer
to read his aloud.

At 9, Malcolm chased students on the playground and
practiced long division in his fourth-grade class. Today,
at 13, he uses a wheelchair to get to class. His speech is
slurred and he cannot write on his own — the results of a
brain injury he sustained when he was hit by a truck in
1999.

Yet he moves through the halls slapping high fives with the
other boys and winking at the girls. If he could walk, it
would certainly be with a swagger.

In New York City, where more than 72,000 special education students are in separate classrooms, Malcolm Thomas is the exception to the rule. He could easily have been placed in District 75, a citywide district that serves almost 20,000 of the city’s most severely disabled students.

But Malcolm’s mother and advocates for special education
spent countless hours attending meetings and filling out
forms to get him into a regular classroom. Now, he spends
his days with seventh graders at the Upper Lab School in
the Chelsea section of Manhattan.

The social benefits of Malcolm’s education seem clear: he
enjoys school and has many friends. But it is difficult to
determine exactly what Malcolm is learning. To spend a week with him is to see the benefits and the drawbacks of
inclusion, as the policy of placing special education
students in mainstream classes is called.

Federal law mandates that such students be placed in the
“least-restrictive environment.” Three years ago, the
city’s Board of Education approved a plan to mainstream
more students. But New York lags far behind other cities in
this regard, according to a report from the Least
Restrictive Environment Coalition.

More than 50 percent of the city’s special education
students still spend most of their time in separate
classrooms, while the figure is about 8 percent statewide
and 20 percent nationally. The number of special education
students in regular classrooms has increased by less than 4
percentage points since 2000.

The slow pace of the shift is, in part, a consequence of
sheer volume — there are more than 140,000 special
education students in New York City, a number that is
larger than the entire student population of many school
systems elsewhere. And unlike other cities, New York has a district dedicated solely to special education.

Linda Wernikoff, the deputy superintendent for special
education, acknowledged that the city has been moving
slowly. In the past, the city “relied very heavily on
segregated classes,” she said, adding, “You do not change
20 years in a year or two.”

Malcolm, like any other special education student, needs
extra resources, including a laptop computer and a full-
time aide and a special education teacher to jointly teach
each of his classes. The school system could not provide
cost comparisons for mainstreaming a special education
student versus keeping the student segregated, in part
because the level of services can vary widely. On average,
the city spends $28,000 a year on each special education
student.

In class, Malcolm’s attention wanders often, and he drifts
off without warning. During one period, he might stretch
his arms in a huge yawn before putting his head on a desk
to fall asleep. Later, he might be explaining what makes
shapes mathematically similar.

“You don’t know what will grab him,” said Sam Affoumado, one of Malcolm’s humanities teachers. “When you see that he is interested in something, you have to capitalize on that right away.”

In a recent class, Mr. Affoumado asked students what self-
confidence meant. Several raised their hands, but Mr.
Affoumado knew whom to call on.

“You can think you are good, but you’re really only good if
people say so,” Malcolm said, before turning the
conversation to one of his favorite topics, rap music.
“Rappers have to impress other people. They can’t just
think their songs are good. It matters what other people
think.”

Malcolm knows what other people think. He is a teenager who is constantly trying to impress others. Although his brain injury has impaired his speech, he does not hesitate to
perform freestyle raps for anyone who will listen. Students
call him Mr. Popular, a name he has earned by knowing
nearly everyone in the school.

With his perfectly braided cornrows, broad smile and long,
curly eyelashes, Malcolm could pass for a teenage
heartthrob. He wears stylish sweat suits and trendy down
jackets, like many of today’s MTV stars. “I know I’m cool,”
he says often.

Around other students, Malcolm is all smiles. During a fire
drill, he stayed inside with a high school senior who had a
sprained ankle. “Do you want to hear one of my raps?”
Malcolm asked him, just moments after they met.

Malcolm, who goes by the name Lil Popi when he performs for friends, began to rhyme: “See, I talk slow, but I sank low. I’ll steal your girl before you know and don’t say I never told you so.”

Malcolm’s paraprofessional assistant, Sam Falcone, looked
on with pride. “That would never happen at another school,” said Mr. Falcone, who has worked with special education students in several city schools.

All students reap the social benefits of including special
education students in regular classrooms, Mr. Affoumado
said.

“I guarantee they learn more from Malcolm than he does from them,” he said. The principals at Lab boast that the
school’s mainstreaming program has helped get several
special education students into college.

Nadia Schreiber, 13, said she was nervous when she learned she would be sitting next to Malcolm for several periods a day. She said she was afraid that she might not be able to focus on her work because Malcolm might distract her.

Now, she volunteers to takes notes for Malcolm while Mr.
Falcone goes to lunch. Most of the Lab students know about
Malcolm’s disabilities, but they never talk about them,
Nadia said.

“You can tell that he really is smart,” she said. “He has
really interesting things to say. He just has a hard time.”

A dozen other special education students attend Lab. They
sit alongside regular students most of the time, but spend
one period a day in a resource room, where they receive
extra help in math, science, English and social studies.

Donna Tirp, a math and science teacher, spent a recent
afternoon preparing Malcolm and four other students in the
resource room for a math test.

“There may be a question just like this, say on Tuesday,”
she said.

As class ended and Mr. Falcone began to wheel Malcolm to the bus, Ms. Tirp bent down and whispered: “Are you going to get an A on this test? Is the old Malcolm going to
return?”

For most of the first quarter, Malcolm had repeatedly aced
tests in math, his favorite subject. But on a recent test,
he only eked out a D.

His mother, Jacquelyn Peak, understands that the work at
school often goes over his head.

Every night, when Malcolm returns from school, she spends
more than an hour typing his homework on the laptop
computer and helping him read his assignments.

“It’s hard and there is a lot of it,” Ms. Peak said. “There
are things I don’t understand, and he can’t explain it to
me.”

Many nights, assignments go undone. Malcolm has to do the
homework himself, Ms. Peak says. Recently, she has
considered asking district officials for a home tutor or a
reduced workload for Malcolm.

Still, she is an adamant defender of Malcolm’s current
class. Test scores, grades and assignments are not an
indicator of his learning, she said. Instead, she measures
his success by his attitude.

“He comes home happy and he wants to go to school the next day,” she said. “I would know right away if he wasn’t
learning.”