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In a single year of attending regular classes, Chris gained two years in spoken-language skills. His mother has no doubt that the influence of that environment triggered the conduct. He had picked up the behavior from another student in his 2nd grade special education class. She tells of a day when Chris, an otherwise energetic prankster, came home from school drooling. Vogelberger uses her hard-won experience with Chris to help other families. A family-support coordinator for a Carroll County school program for infants and toddlers with special needs, Ms. It hit me like a two-by-four that this was not what I wanted for Chris,” she says. “The other one I saw and right away I knew-he just had the DS look. He really fit in,” says Cindy Vogelberger. “I knew that the included boy had Down syndrome, but I couldn’t tell by looking at him. One was in a regular classroom, the other in a special education school. Several years earlier, the Vogelbergers-who have three other children, ages 9 to 16-lobbied to put Chris in a regular classroom after meeting two middle school students with Down syndrome. What’s more, school administrators had sought permission from the district to allow Chris to attend, even though the Vogelbergers did not yet live within the school’s attendance boundaries. The one-level building, for instance, had classrooms grouped for each grade and rooms with sinks and partitions to allow for multiple uses. Peter and Cindy Vogelberger liked the 2-year-old school’s disability-friendly engineering. And of that same group, almost half spent more than 80 percent of their school day in a regular classroom.Ĭhris ended up at Shiloh because his parents had bought property nearby and were planning to build a house there. school-age children with disabilities were in regular classrooms for at least some of their school day.
In the 1998-99 school year, about 96 percent of U.S. More than a quarter-century after the passage of what is now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, most children with special needs are taught in classes alongside their peers without disabilities. Education Week was allowed to follow his progress throughout the year for this story.Ĭhris’ situation is becoming more common. He had to switch classrooms and teachers-six times a day-and make a whole new set of friends. Last fall, he faced a new set of challenges as he moved from elementary to middle school. When he was first included in a regular classroom, in 3rd grade, it took him a year to adjust.