Evanston Review
Park School parents air inclusion concerns
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December 15, 2009
By KAREN BERKOWITZ
Parents of students with severe disabilities who attend Park School in Evanston pleaded Tuesday for District 65 not to dismantle the school as part of an inclusion plan, saying Park School is the "least restrictive environment" for their youngsters.
Several parents spoke passionately of how they'd once hoped their youngster could lead near-normal lives but they'd been forced to relinquish those dreams.
"We have given (those dreams) up, not because they are not still what we wish for, not because we are lazy. We have given them up because they are not our reality," said parent Barry Mineroff.
The District 65 Board of Education recently adopted a conceptual inclusion plan that calls for educating students with disabilities in "integrated, age-appropriate environments that fully support their social, emotional, physical and academic needs." The plan calls for reviewing inclusion for Park School and including Park School students in the implementation timeline. The plan also calls for assigning all students with disabilities to a general education classroom.
But Superintendent Hardy Murphy stressed Thursday that "there is no plan to close Park School. Inclusion is an individual student-by-student process" and Park students will be considered on an individual basis like other students with individual plans, he said.
Murphy took exception to the Review's original Dec. 17 story stating that
the plan calls for the eventual elimination of Park School.
"The present inclusion plan will slowly dismantle Park School, one year at a time," said parent Melissa Little, who spoke for the Park community in asking the district to reinstate its pre-kindergarten and kindergarten programs at Park. She also asked the district to survey families to gauge if and how their children's needs could be served in a general education setting.
Consultant's advice
The inclusion plan was developed this year after Indiana University consultant Cassandra Cole was hired to review District 65's progress toward implementing 17 recommendations in her critical 2002 evaluation of the district's special education services. While Cole concluded the district had made strides on most fronts, she continued to question the need for a separate facility for students with severe disabilities.
"While Park School makes genuine attempts at providing integration with nondisabled peers, it is not 'at naturally occurring times and places' -- lunch, recess, hallways, art, music, et cetera -- in which the general education students would be interacting," she wrote in her May report.
"There is a preponderance of evidence across the country that students with the most-intense needs can be educated in an age-appropriate, integrated school building."
Park School opened in the mid-1980s after District 65 invested substantially in retrofitting the shuttered Central School.
Park School currently serves 74 students ages 3 through 21, including medically fragile children and youngsters with moderate to profound mental impairments, often accompanied by other disabilities.
Some parents said their children are unable to verbally communicate. The school also serves some deaf and hard-of-hearing youngsters under a regional Low-Incidence Cooperative Agreement.
Of the 74 youngsters educated at Park, 33 come from District 65 and 22 from Evanston Township High School District 202. An additional 19 students across all ages come from outside the district, with tuition paid by their home school districts.
Megan Lassman's 4-year-old daughter, Penelope, has cerebral palsy and a vascular brain condition. She experiences strokes and has lost the ability to communicate through language.
"When you realize how impacted your child really is," Lassman said, "there is a grieving process. Once you walk through the door of Park School, you are overjoyed.
"You realize you are home."