Special Education Rate Among State’s Lowest

By Beau Yarbrough, Hesperia Star, Calif.

Feb. 27–With less than eight percent of its students classified as Special Education students, the Hesperia Unified School District has among the lowest percentage of "Special Ed" students in California.

The statewide norm is 10 percent of a student body in Special Education, said Jim Huckeba, Director of Special Services for the school district, while Hesperia only has 7.8 percent of its students in Special Education classes. For Hesperia, the answer is in their much-heralded Excel program.

"We began about 10 years ago implementing this model that we call Excel," Huckeba said. "Basically what it is, is intervention [with] students before they get so far behind that they qualify for special education."

Approximately 52 percent of Special Education students in California are in the classes for learning disabilities, rather than physical disabilities or emotional problems.

But Huckeba says it’s possible to spot children who might otherwise be destined to be considered "learning disabled" and to give them the extra academic attention they might need earlier than school systems traditionally do.

"Kids don’t become eligible as special education until they are in third or fourth grade," he said. Schools often don’t recognize the academic challenges facing students in one or more subjects "until it’s often too late to help them."

In contrast, students receive additional teaching via the Excel program as soon as a problem is identified.

"It’s a proactive approach rather than a reactive approach," Huckeba said. "We begin, actually, at the kindergarten level, testing … to determine current function. Then we cluster the kids together with similar needs."

For the most part of the day, the students remain in their normal classes. But at certain times a day, classes break up into smaller groups, where students can receive additional teaching at a level appropriate to the group’s needs.

"Then we bring in the additional staff members … and lower the student to teacher ratio to provide for the student needs, no matter what they’re labeled," Huckeba said. "Everybody at that time, whether they’re regular ed, or special ed, goes to a special table at that time, goes to a table at that time, based on their special needs."

In a school district with an exploding student population, this approach is partly good educational theory and partly simple practicality.

"It’s a matter of clustering the students together so that you can more efficiently meet their needs at all levels," Huckeba said. "We did not add any additional staff members to do it. … The concept behind this … is to look at existing resources."

As a result of this system, "we’ve seen a 64 percent decrease as the number of students who are classified as special education" despite the student body growing dramatically in the past 10 years and API scores have improved across all schools by 159 points.

The district’s approach has attracted attention from beyond its borders: The HUSD has been recognized as a Leadership Group by the California Services for Technical Assistance and Training (CalSTAT, a division of the California Department of Education). "We’ve worked together with over 100 different schools to show them how to do this. … Last year, I think we had 60 or so visitations."

The approach worked almost too well: Last year, the district ran afoul of the federal No Child Left Behind legislation, because their remaining Special Education students – the ones with the most significant educational hurdles to leap – weren’t improving fast enough. It was a plight shared by other schools around the state and the nation.

"The feds are now proposing what they call a response to intervention approach," Huckeba said. "That’s basically what we’ve been using for the past 10 years. I think every school in the country is going to have to do something similar to what we’re doing."

In other words, the goal really is to have no child left behind.

"We’re trying to increase the academic achievement for all of our students, from the lowest to the highest, regardless of whether they have a label or not," Huckeba said.

Beau Yarbrough can be reached at beau@hesperiastar.com or by telephone at 956-7108.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Hesperia Star, Calif.

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