SMITHFIELD -- Prompted by new federal rules, the state has launched a five-year plan to expand access to special-education services, especially at young ages, and stop the misdiagnosis of healthy children as "disabled."
In 2000, Rhode Island ranked first in the nation in the proportion of students in special education -- nearly 1 in 5 -- more than 3 percent higher than the national average, and more than twice the state's rate 20 years ago.
In fiscal 2000, Rhode Island spent more than $243 million on special education, a 152-percent increase from 1990, or twice the growth rate of education expenditures overall. Every year, schools superintendents complain to local and state officials that they can't keep up with the skyrocketing costs.
And yet despite the huge investment, it's unclear whether all the students who need special-education services are getting them -- especially those in minority groups. Blind and visually impaired students are widely recognized to be underserved in Rhode Island, with support varying substantially from town to town.
And there are questions about how well special-needs students are doing in school: in 2001, only 58 percent of students with disabilities earned high-school diplomas, compared with 74 percent of non-disabled students.
Prompted by new requirements from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs, the state launched a major review last fall of its services for special-needs children, from the state Department of Health's early-intervention programs, to the public schools' offerings for Rhode Islanders who have disabilities and who are under 21.
This spring, after getting input from the federal government, state officials and experts from the Rhode Island Technical Assistance Project at Rhode Island College drafted a plan to correct flaws in the system.
Money is not a central part of the discussion -- though there is an effort under way, led by state Rep. Paul Sherlock, D-Warwick, to target money more efficiently, and state officials are paying close attention.
The real priority, however, is to ensure that each child is served properly, whether it's in the special-education system or not, said Thomas DiPaola, director of the Department of Education's Office of Special Needs.
A big part of that is to ensure that children's problems are caught earlier, before they result in several years' worth of literacy gaps or other problems that are much harder to treat -- and costlier -- than early intervention would be, DiPaola said.
The state also wants to set standards for how students are diagnosed with specific disabilities, so there's no question that what is considered a cognitive disorder in an East Greenwich school would be identified the same way in Central Falls.
Having found, as part of the federally mandated self-study, that Rhode Island's data on special-needs students is deeply flawed -- incomplete, inaccurate, and hard to compare with data for the population as a whole -- state officials say they are committed to getting better and more complete data to guide their decisions.
And in conjunction with the state's school-accountability laws and regulations -- which now require more support than ever for non-disabled students -- educational leaders hope to steer children who shouldn't be in special education into more appropriate and less costly school programs.
"I think all of us think we could invest our money better than we've invested it," DiPaola said in an interview.
SPECIAL EDUCATION covers a wide range of "disabilities," from physical handicaps such as paralysis and blindness, to mental retardation and developmental delays, to behavioral disorders, to speech impairments and learning disabilities.
In Rhode Island, speech impairments and learning disabilities account for about 75 percent of special-needs cases.
The centerpiece of special-education programs is the individual educational plan, or IEP, which provides a customized set of services for each child to suit his or her specific needs.
Depending on the child's disability, an IEP may call for placement in a special school, in a classroom with other special-needs children, or in the mainstream, perhaps with an aide designated to help him or her.
For many students with speech or learning disabilities, the IEP only provides "resource" services -- a small part of the school day when they are taken out of class to get tutoring or other special help, much like some programs for mainstream children with academic gaps, such as Reading Recovery.
In 2001, three-fifths of Rhode Island's special-needs students got "resource" services, a quarter were in separate ("self-contained") classrooms, and the rest were provided with other services, according to the state Department of Education.
THE STATE released its special-education improvement plan at a conference Thursday and yesterday at Bryant College that drew a mix of school officials, health-care and social-service providers, teachers and parents.
The plan itself was drafted with the help of more than 100 educators, parents and community leaders, and the goal was to enlist those constituencies to help solve the system's problems.
The proposed solutions are multifaceted:
Tighten up monitoring of special-education programs by streamlining the way data is collected. Currently, the Department of Education's data -- about how many students at each school are disabled, the race and poverty level of students, how disabled children do on the state tests, and how often students get suspended and expelled -- is all gathered separately, producing incongruous results.
DiPaola also said he would like to tie the schools' data to information from early-intervention programs, so each child's progress can be tracked.
Expand the availability of early-intervention programs and ensure that they reach all the children who could benefit from them, especially to prevent more serious problems as they grow up. There will also be an effort to ease children's transition from those programs into school.
Improve special-needs students' high school graduation rates, work harder to help youths with disabilities prepare for life after school, and keep track of their progress, to measure the effectiveness of their school services.
Build partnerships with families, so parents are more aware of what's available for their children and are more actively involved in key decisions.
Encourage schools to meet children's needs within the mainstream system, to the extent it is possible, by training teachers to address different learning styles, behavior problems, and other concerns that often lead to students being placed in special education.
Sherlock, the state representative who is preparing to release his own report on special education, attended the Bryant conference and called the improvement plan a "healthy beginning."
"There's a lot of good stuff in there," Sherlock said. "But you know, plans are plans -- they have to be activated, and people have to be dedicated to them."
Asked whether he expects the state plan to make a real difference, Sherlock said there is now a promising "consciousness level" about special education, and he thinks parents and teachers will want to jump in, because it will ensure that all children are better served.
"It's filling in the cracks so that people can't fall through them, and that's achievable," Sherlock said.
The state's Continuous Improvement Monitoring Process (CIMP) study of special education, and its plan to address problems, can both be downloaded from the Department of Education's Web site, at http://www.ridoe.com/Specialneeds.
