Least Restrictive Environment or...?

[Ms. Kathy]

[shadow=red,left,300]What do you think?[/shadow]
You could be answering for yourself or your child or as someone looking from the outside, but what educational setting do you prefer for children with visual impairments?

Option 1: Public school with modification depending on vision i.e., large print for low vision, braille, preferential seating, etc. The child is otherwise included in the general population of the school.

Option 2: Public school with a special class. The student attends a public school but is segreated from sighted peers in a special class for children with visual impairments.

Option 3: State/residential school. The student attends a special school for children with visual impairments. Depending on how far away his/her home is the child may sleep overnight at the school during the week.

Option 4: Home School. The child does not attend school but is educated at home by a parent.

Option 5: No school. The child does not attend school.

Option 6: Public school for partially sighted only. The child with some usable vision attends public school with sighted peers but the totally blind or braille reader should not.

Option 7: Depends on the child. The options should vary depending on whether the child is developmentally delayed, college bound, independent or dependent, etc.

Option 8: Public school special center. A school for the blind should be created in the public school system for the blind as there are centers for the developmentally delayed.

[Ms. Kathy]

Blind school's future a matter of real estate?
by Anna Griffin, The Oregonian
Friday May 22, 2009, 8:21 PM

Parenting is hard enough when your kids are perfectly healthy. Every child suffers hurt feelings and scraped knees. Every mom and dad wants to make things right.

Imagine then, the misery Kathy O'Malley has suffered.

Her son, Kegan, always seemed like an awkward kid, falling on the playground, running into walls on his way to the bathroom at night. Doctors discovered the problem when he was 8: retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic eye disorder that causes blindness. His younger sister, Kelsey, soon received the same diagnosis.

Imagine watching both your children go blind. The anger. The powerlessness. The struggle to help them understand why their worlds are slowly, steadily going dark.

Kegan, now 23, had a generally miserable experience in the North Clackamas schools and lacks the skills to live on his own, O'Malley said. Kelsey was a teenager and having the same issues when her parents moved her to the Oregon School for the Blind.

The Salem school, near the Capitol, offers visually impaired students basic life skills rather than a standard K-12 curriculum. Kelsey, 17, has flourished there, her mom says.

"She's found her community, which has given her so much more confidence, so much more independence," O'Malley says. "She cannot wait to go back every Sunday night."

Now imagine finding the right place for your child, then losing it.

Over the years, Oregon leaders have been lousy stewards of the school, allowing it to lose accreditation and fall into disrepair. The Department of Education has pushed moving its students to the same Salem spot as the Oregon School for the Deaf. That would solve the maintenance problem and free the state to sell the current campus, eight acres appraised at $9.1 million.

State Rep. Sara Gelser, a Corvallis Democrat and chairwoman of the House Education Committee, wants colleagues to go even further, to finally find the political will to close the school after this academic year. Her bill, which passed the House Ways & Means Committee on Friday, would use the school's annual $3 million budget to improve local programs for visually impaired students. More than 800 blind children attend hometown schools statewide, compared with 31 at School for the Blind this year.

"We have made mistakes, and we can do better for all of these kids," Gelser said. "We can make sure they get the education they're legally promised at home."

On a practical level, she makes sense. Still, imagine this was your kid. You'd fight like hell, right?

"There has to be something else going on," says O'Malley, a real estate broker using the free time created by the recession to lobby legislators and talk to lawyers. This will almost certainly wind up in court, as O'Malley and other parents hope to prove the real issue is the future of the school's real estate rather than what's best for students.

"It doesn't make sense that they'd do this so quickly, given the number of children it hurts," O'Malley says. "There must be another motive."

Perhaps more than anyone else in Salem, the architect of the closure plan understands her frustration.

Gelser's 14-year-old son suffers from a genetic disorder similar to Down syndrome. In one breath, she defends the process -- noting that her committee spent 15 hours in studying and discussing the school. In the next, she talks about how much she admires O'Malley and other parents' passion.

"I have no doubt that this is the right educational policy for the long term, but the burden of that is falling on the shoulders of these families," she says. "Of course they're angry. These are their kids we're talking about."

-- Anna Griffin; [e-mail]; oregonlive.com/griffin
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