children out of school in america - University of Tennessee Digital ...

dren. Through outreach efforts, 7,400 excluded
mentally retarded children were found. ll The District
of Columbia similarly identified at least 848
children who had been excluded.'2 Even though
officials professed to have found all those in need of
services, we found mentally retarded children who
had never been to school in the D.C. Census tract
we surveyed.
Outreach efforts highlight all the problems of
identifying special needs children. First, there are
differences among children that require different
programs of treatment. Rarely are these definitions
clear and explicit, either at the federal, state, or
local level. Rarely are they consistent across districts
or states. IS Therefore, trying to estimate incidence
of a particular problem or need for services is an
imprecise and often frustrating exercise. One example
of the confusion that can result happened in
Floyd County, Kentucky. OCR's Annual School
Survey asked for information on children who were
"severely emotionally disturbed, socially maladjusted,
underachievers, and slow learners" without further
definitions. The Floyd County school district included
in their report to OCR over 2,500 students
who were enrolled in Title I remedial reading programs.
Sumter County No.2, in South Carolina, also
seems to have reported students in its Title I remedial
reading and math programs in these special
education categories in their report to OCR. This
error is understandable in view of the lack of precision
at OCR and at the local district level in defining
special needs. Yet it is not trivial. It misleads
officials about how many children in school need
and actually are receiving special services.
11 David Kirp, William Buss, and Peter Kurilotf, "Legal
Reform of Special Education," California Law Review,
Vol. 62 (January, 1974) p. 63.
12 Interview with Merle Van Dyke, Assistant Superintendent,
Special Education, Washington, D.C., 3/7/74.
13 For the purpose of programs funded under the Education
of the Handicapped Act, the Bureau of Education for the
Handicapped, U.S. Department of Health, Education and
Welfare, defines "handicapped children" to mean "mentally
retarded, hard of hearing, deaf, speech impaired, visually
handicapped, seriously emotionally disturbed, crippled, or
other health impaired children who by reason thereof require
special education and related services. The term includes
children with specific learning disabilities to the
extent that such children are health impaired children who
by reason thereof require special education and related
services." 45 C.F.R. §121.2.
We found estimates of need varying greatly. On
a national level, HEW's Bureau of Education for
the Handicapped said that in 1971-72, only 44 percent
of handicapped children ages 0-21 were being
served in public schools or state-supported institutions.
A Rand study for HEW estimated that 59
percent of handicapped children ages 5-17 were being
served in public schools during the 1972-73
school year. 14
On a local level, while most school officials we
visited could tell us what kinds of programs they
had in their districts, they could tell us virtually
nothing about the number of children being served
by these programs or the number of children needing
such programs. Precise data did not exist even
where there was an obligation to conduct a general
school census or a special census of handicapped
children. For example, in South Carolina "each district
is directed to conduct a survey of the educational
needs of all handicapped children" under the
recently enacted South Carolina Mandatory Education
Act for the Handicapped. However, school
districts were given the option to project needs based
on their own intradistrict survey and/or on incidence
figures set forth by the state. Since Sumter County
No.2 chose to rely on state incidence figures, and
did not conduct a survey, officials there had no notion
of the number of children eligible to receive
services under the law. Richland County School
District No. 1 also relied on incidence figures' prepared
by the state and consequently the actual service
needs in this school district remain indeterminate.
Floyd County, Kentucky officials purported to
conduct a general house-to-house census each spring
which included handicapped children. But the counts
are notoriously inaccurate. These censuses are conducted
by teachers on their own time and with no
extra help or compensation. Families living at the
heads of the hollow, or several miles off a creek,
simply are not counted. Unfortunately, it is children
in such remote locations that are likely to be out of
school.
14 See Kakalik, Services for Handicapped Youth: A Program
Overview, pp. 112-118. The discrepancy in these figures
may be caused by the reports including different age
groupings or it may be caused by new services for handicapped
children provided in the last several years.
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