Southborough job listings: Positions working for Southborough schools and Part-time dispatchers

Hmmm…this is a complicated topic to address. First of all, what monies are being “drained”? As far as your experience at Nashoba, I’m not sure when you went to high school, but up until 1973 students with disabilities were not guaranteed an education at all. I googled, and here’s a brief history on Special Education:

Until 1973 there was no comprehensive law protecting the rights of students with disabilities and so the physically disabled, the “slow” students, and the “disturbed” were removed when it became inconvenient to keep them in school with the rest, or dropped out when they became humiliated by the ever widening gap between them and their school mates. It was the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 that provided the statutory framework for modern disability laws. This act sprang from a humanistic desire to protect the disabled from inhumane treatment in the workplace and in the classroom. Section 504 of the act defined a disability as, “a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, [which] may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell or do mathematical calculations.”

This was followed in 1975 with PL 94-142, which challenged the exclusion of students with disabilities from public education provided for their non-disabled peers, calling for a “free and appropriate public education for every child, no matter how seriously he may be handicapped. In 1990 it was renamed the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) which outlined an array of services for public school students with disabilities to be delivered in the “least restrictive environment” (LRE). IDEA, both an education law and a civil rights law, boldly guaranteed an opportunity to learn for all students regardless of their disability. In 1990 the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), carried the protection of people with disabilities into the private sector. The ADA states that anyone with a disability that results in a “substantial impairment of a major life activity” is protected, and that schools and employers cannot discriminate and must provide “reasonable accommodations” to adapt to these disabilities.

Of these measures, 504 and ADA are purposefully vague in wording allowing for the widest possible response to individual situations. These are basically civil rights measures, which address equity and civil rights from a democratic perspective, asserting that every student has a right to a public education. These pieces of legislation, giving the disabled the same status as other minority groups, shave yielded a variety of service delivery models, from mainstreaming, to special day classes, to full inclusion.

From your description, it appears that these students were all housed in two classrooms – nowadays, inclusion is the norm (students with disabilities educated alongside their peers) unless a specific type of learning environment is required. As you noted, inclusion “in all aspects of school activities” benefits the entire school community.

As far as the numbers of students with special needs, I’d imagine that many kids in past years had learning challenges which were not addressed simply because there was a lack of awareness. Numbers likely haven’t increased too much – what has increased is knowledge about disabilities. Students and communities benefit when we spend money to help ensure that individuals with disabilities receive effective instruction in order to achieve their potential and become contributing members of society. That seems like a wise investment to me.