Why Not These 3 Children? Parents Ask Why Can’t Kids Attend New School

David Luplow lives less than a mile from South Elgin High.

For Natalie Herrera, it’s 1.7 miles to the school from her home across town. Same for Kevin Chandetka.

Yet when the trio of 15-year-olds file on the school bus next fall, they will pass Elgin Area School District U-46′s gleaming new high school and keep right on going.

David, Natalie and Kevin – classmates for years – were told they will attend Streamwood High this fall, nine miles away.

After a freshman year spent at Bartlett High. After a district career spanning six schools already. After a new high school was built on a South Elgin farm – a school parents say they were told their children would attend.

The school was built with the needs of students such as David, Natalie and Kevin in mind.

David and Natalie, 15-year-olds who play on the same baseball team, have Down syndrome.

Kevin, a 15-year-old sophomore who mastered the piano without taking a single lesson, is autistic.

Parents contend such conditions do not preclude them from attending a neighborhood school, the cornerstone of Superintendent Connie Neale’s redistricting last year.

“They’re making a big fit about home school, home school, and she can’t get to her home school,” said Natalie’s mom, Kim Herrera. “We were told this is where our kids were going to be for their high school years.”

David’s mother, Patti, is similarly upset.

“My biggest gripe, and I hate to say this,” she said, “but our tax dollars in this town are going to this high school and he won’t even get to use it.”

District officials point out he will not get to use it yet.

South Elgin High has a pair of classrooms that resemble a small apartment, complete with a kitchen, washroom and living room outfitted for teens who need coaching to live independently.

With space limited and demand high, U-46 officials reserved seats for students who are at least 18 years old with four years of high school to their credit.

Federal and state laws demand students with special needs receive help through their 21st birthday.

Countering parent claims they were promised a seat at South Elgin High, U-46 officials said they make no such guarantees. Where a child attends class, they say, depends on a child’s needs, where they live and what programs suit their needs.

“We wanted to have a program for kids who had completed four years of high school and didn’t need a comprehensive high school but needed a transitional program,” U-46 Special Education Director Maria Smith said. “This is another option for kids.”

Kids other than David, Natalie and Kevin this fall.

“We were so excited,” said Merchita Chandetka, Kevin’s mother. “For the first time we thought Kevin would be really close. He’s been in the bus for a long time.”

Traveling to learn

Waking early to catch a school bus is not new to Kevin.

But the building at the end of the bus trip often is.

Kevin will attend his sixth district school this fall if he enrolls at Streamwood High.

Beyond his U-46 kindergarten classes, he cycled through Hanover Countryside Elementary in Streamwood, Creekside Elementary in west Elgin, Canton Middle School in Streamwood, Bartlett High and now Streamwood.

Merchita and Keck Chandetka laud teachers who help Kevin. They just take exception to the number of schools he attended to get it.

“Autistic children have a lot of socialization problems,” Merchita Chandetka said. “They like routines. It’s the way they keep track of the day.”

The day unravels quickly, experts say, when routines are interrupted. Kevin copes with change by rocking incessantly.

“We have some concerns,” Chandetka said. “He likes routine; and they keep changing the schools, the buildings where he is supposed to go.”

Experts agree, saying autistic children require a structured environment, though reactions differ when disruptions occur.

“No two children on the spectrum are alike. That also applies to treatment and environment,” said Vanessa Collier, communications director with the Autism Society of America. “What’s comforting to one may be distressful to another.”

District officials do not dispute pinballing school to school can be detrimental.

Yet the more specialized a child’s needs, the more likely he must travel beyond his neighborhood to receive help he needs, help he legally is due.

Offsetting desires to keep a child close to home, Smith said, are desires to get him appropriate help in an appropriate setting for an appropriate cost.

“Our goal is for kids to transition the least number of times as possible,” Smith said. “You develop a rapport. You get to know the environment. We don’t like to move kids.”

Weighing legal scales

No constitutional right exists requiring every student attend the neighborhood school.

That much is clear.

More murky, however, is how students with special needs receive the free, appropriate public education they, by law, deserve.

“The general rule is that kids with disabilities are supposed to be placed in the least restrictive setting appropriate for their needs,” said Mark Weber, a DePaul University law professor and expert in rights of the disabled.

Both are principles rooted in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act, which was retooled last year.

The goal of the law, Weber said, is to teach children with severe learning needs in the same school they would attend had they no disability.

“(Courts) have not required a child be placed in the neighborhood school when there is a good reason to place the child somewhere else that is reasonably close,” Weber said.

The more exceptional the need, the better the reason.

Add to that the cost of immersing kids with severe disabilities into mainstream classes and there is another reason, courts acknowledged.

With three-quarters of Illinois school districts operating in the red – U-46 among them – the financial reality of special education can be daunting. Schools must tailor an education to each child’s needs without trampling on his or her right to learn in the least encumbered environment.

“It’s ever the problem of balancing children who have very particular needs with the needs of the rest of the community,” said Gayle Mindes, a DePaul University professor and special education expert.

Left to weigh the legalities versus the financials are district officials.

“Our goal is to service them as best as we possibly can,” Superintendent Connie Neale said.

To do it, U-46 spent an estimated $54.4 million last year. Some 5,105 students – 12.9 percent of the district’s 39,491 charges – receive special education services, for everything from a severe stutter to severe brain damage.

State and federal money and grants covered half the bill, Neale said.

“In the best of all worlds,” Neale said, “you’d have every program in every school. It’s not always economically feasible or practical.”

South Elgin High

Clad in shorts, T-shirt and pigtails, Natalie sits in the living room of her family’s South Elgin home.

Waiting for the Cubs to take the field, a game Natalie’s eager to watch with her father, she amuses herself.

She flips through pictures, pointing out her brother in his class play at South Elgin’s Willard Elementary School.

She reviews a favorite homework assignment about counting coins from her freshman year at Bartlett High.

Natalie aced it.

That Natalie may not go to South Elgin High this fall is not something Kim Herrera wants to raise with her daughter.

“You’ve got to talk about things with Natalie so she’ll know what to expect,” Herrera said. “She keeps saying ‘South Elgin High School?’ I’m like ‘no.’ Occasionally I’ll say, ‘probably Streamwood.’”

“We’re kind of used to the here, there and everywhere.”

Yet the here, there and everywhere is what Herrera, Luplow and Chandetka dispute. They’d hoped starting anew at South Elgin High in the fall – with its rooms devoted to the needs of disabled children – would change all that.

In those rooms, they said, they want their children to learn how to survive independently, whether it is holding a job, shopping for themselves or balancing a checkbook.

That David may learn those lessons at South Elgin High when he turns 18 does little to assuage Luplow’s concerns.

“Now the school is open and he’s not going there, and I’m not happy,” Luplow said. “He wants so much to be like the rest of the kids. He has the same emotions as other kids.”

“We are not here to fight them,” U-46′s Maria Smith said of parents.

“Special education kids are very, very unique. They don’t fit in a tight descriptor. That makes programming for them very difficult.”

District officials completed a review of such special education programs this month. They pledged to monitor class sizes, recruit more staff and consider starting a program for youngsters with severe needs.

The new apartment fashioned at South Elgin High, akin to a similar U-46 program in Elgin, adds to the options for older students with severe disabilities. Some 30 people are expected.

South Elgin freshmen and sophomores with less severe needs also will attend the new school, Principal Jean Bowen said. About 90 of them, in fact.

“My goal is to incorporate all youngsters in this building to their maximum ability,” Bowen said. “There is a richness youngsters give each other when we allow them to interact.”

Herrera wants that richness for Natalie now. She plans to keep asking until Natalie gets it.

“You got to be your child’s advocate,” Herrera said. “No one else is going to do it for you.”