Least Restrictive Environment

The other day I participated in a least restrictive environment (LRE) needs assessment in the Kennett Consolidated School District (click here). I was invited to participate (a) because I am the parent of students in the district, (b) because of my role as school board president, and (c) because I am a professor of special education. It was attended by special and general educators from the district as well as administrators and other parents (including a mother of a young man with autism), and was facilitated by two inclusive practices facilitators from the Chester County Intermediate Unit.

We spent the first portion of the day examining data on how well the district does with regard to including students with disabilities according to criteria associated with the Gaskins ruling in Pennsylvania. Put simply, Gaskins uses, as a prime consideration of inclusive education, the actual percentage of time a student with disabilities spends in general education settings, ostensibly working on the general education curriculum. The second part of the day allowed us to develop an action plan to address needs we identified as a result of our earlier examination of the data.

During the first hour or so of the data examination phase of this process I bit my tongue off nearly a dozen times as I listened to comments made about inclusive education, vis-à-vis Gaskins, that ranged from humorous to ridiculous to downright inaccurate.

On the humorous side was a question about whether or not we ought to count the time students with disabilities spend in the hallways moving from one class to the next as inclusion. More ridiculous was the notion that somehow it is more inclusive to have students with disabilities, regardless of how severe, sitting in high school academic subjects alongside their peers without disabilities. And the reason given for why we send some of our children to out-of-district placements is because it is impossible to provide them in district schools with specially designed instruction that is appropriate for them was, well, just plum wrong.

We have a legal requirement to place students with disabilities in the least restrictive environment. This has been a cornerstone of all the iterations of the federal law pertaining to special education (as of late, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act, originally the Education of All Handicapped Children Act—PL 94-142). The model that has been used to operationalize this requirement is the “continuum of services” described by Evelyn Deno back in the late sixties and early seventies (for a time reference, PL 94-142 was signed into law in 1975).

In a nutshell the model suggests that we maintain a linear array of educational services and placement options, ranging from regular class placement to institutional settings, so that we place student in an inclusive a setting as possible, on the one hand, but so that they get the services they need on the other hand. The problem is that one doesn’t have to move far down the continuum from the general education setting end before one is removed totally from the general education classroom or even the neighborhood school building. The reality for students with severe disabilities who are placed along the continuum is that, since the more intense services have become associated with the more restrictive settings, they almost always find themselves clustered in far-flung, segregated, center-based school settings.

The reason I bit my tongue off so often was that the continuum of services with its implicit acceptance of a deficit-oriented approach to human disabilities will always be incongruent with inclusive education. Think about it.

Rather than a continuum such as Deno’s, we ought to consider a model in which we support students with disabilities, not along a continuum of any sort, because that would always mean pigeonholing students with unique needs, but by designing and implementing idiosyncratic supports for students with disabilities within the context of the general school community.

This isn’t easy. It means we would need to change many things about the traditional way we go about public education. We would need to re-think a lot about the way we conceptualize schools and schooling. How will things need to change for us to move away from the continuum of services, a decidedly linear model, and towards one that is more three dimensional?

Take a stab at that question and I will tell you why we shouldn’t measure inclusive, supported education by timing students with disabilities in the hallway, or why inclusive education isn’t necessarily about students with more severe disabilities spending time in high school Biology, or why it is wrong to think that we can’t support the needs of our students with more severe disabilities at home in our own district schools.

What do you think?