Mentally troubled students overwhelm schools

[The Straight Story]

The cigarette lighter sat on the family computer when Gianni awoke.

He said that a voice in his head, the one he sometimes calls Mr. Angry, told him to bring it to school — and threatened to punish him if he didn’t.

Hours later, after getting angry with his teacher, Gianni set fire to a bulletin board outside a special education classroom. The blaze was quickly doused with water bottles, but school officials had him arrested. He was charged with arson.

Gianni, who has been seeing a psychologist since the age of 3, spent the next 37 days in juvenile detention, five times longer than the typical adolescent accused of a crime in Ramsey County.

“I knew setting a fire was bad, but I didn’t belong in there,” said Gianni, who turned 15 while incarcerated. “Sometimes, my brain thinks of horrible things I don’t want to do.”

Gianni is one of thousands of students afflicted with serious mental health problems who are flooding into Minnesota schools because they have nowhere else to go.

Their complex needs are bringing huge and at times dangerous challenges to special education classrooms that are already struggling to handle increasing numbers of students with other handicaps, including multiple disabilities.

http://www.startribune.com/local/216300511.html

[chervilant]

1. Sadly, we Teachers are at fault

for not providing the prescient intervention necessary to protect these poor children. A timely cavity search, a well-fitted strait jacket -- we could put an end to these shenanigans!

( jic)

[Avalux]

2. So many questions and no real answers unfortunately.

A few thoughts....

Schools should not be held responsible for the care of a child such as Gianni, and the fact that his mother has this expectation is a sad statement of our society's overall wrong-headedness.

There needs to be an infrastructure in place, separate from school. And it may be that traditional school, learning the three Rs, needs to be secondary to the primary goal - healing these children. And not just the children, but that infrastructure also needs to provide support and resources for caretakers.

Then there's the whole pharmaceutical aspect of Gianni's mental health care. He began taking very powerful psychoactive drugs at a very young age; all of which have serious side effects that don't actually fix the underlying problem. They only mask it, and often make the behavior worse. And no one knows the effects of taking them for years and years and years. How can one expect a child with a changing and growing brain ever become whole, ever become healed, being so heavily medicated for essentially, the rest of their life?

We must try to find a different way, a better way, to treat children like Gianni. Their treatment cannot include 'hurting' them in the process - with punishment and maybe even worse - indifference.

https://mcdb.colorado.edu/courses/3650/THE%20NEUROBIOLOGY%20OF%20MEDIATION%20AND%20ITS%20CLINICAL%20EFFECTIVENESS%20IN%20PSYCHIATRIC%20DISORDERS.pdf

[Nay]

3. I've always felt that several categories of children should not be mainstreamed into public

schools -- mentally ill children is one category. A decent society would have decent alternatives (a separate school with mental health professionals as teachers, ideally) so that regular public schools can get on with its education of children without such problems. It is unfair to the child, the teacher, and other students to allow such kids to disrupt the normal workings of a school. In my mind, shoving such children into a regular school and expecting them to 'get better' is showing indifference to that child, and punishes the other children (and the teacher) in that class.

[lumberjack_jeff]

9. "Several categories..." "Mentally ill is one..."? In your view, what are some others?

Children are entitled by law to a free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment.

“No otherwise qualified individual with a disability in the United States . . . shall, solely by reason of her or his disability, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance . . .”

"Mainstreaming" is exactly what they are entitled to, guaranteed by law. Not shutting people with disabilities away in some church basement has been a net positive for everyone, including the neurotypical kids who can now attend school with the full diversity of their fellow citizens.

We can argue whether a public school special education class is the least restrictive environment, given the kids individual needs, but I'm not about to give any ground on the idea that these citizens aren't entitled to the benefits of the public schools that their parents pay for.

[Nay]

13. I think the "least restrictive environment" addresses my point. A child who hears something

in his head tell him to set fire to a school bulletin board should probably be in a slightly more "restrictive" environment. But I understand that many people disagree with me.

And no, I don't think children with disabilities should be shut up in a church basement somewhere. Can we agree that there is something in the middle between a regular classroom environment and a dark church basement? I'm not a teacher, but can teachers weigh in here to tell us exactly how mainstreaming is working, who it is working for, and who it is not? Their experience would be worth more than mine.

And yes, any alternative arrangement we may make for more severely disturbed/disabled kids should be fully funded as a public school and should imitate a public school environment as much as possible.

[liberal_at_heart]

16. thank you for posting the law. Fifty or sixty years ago my autistic son would have

been kept from a mainstreamed education and I would have been blamed for bad parenting. What we really have here is a crisis in a lack of funding so that schools can properly educate these children. Proper funding, comminucation between the school and parent and a plan by which the school and parent can work together to manage the situation. Maybe the child needs medication. Maybe the school needs a plan and training for staff so that everyone knows what to do in situations like these. Keeping these children from a proper education like the law says they are entitled to is not the answer. Never was.

[cali]

10. you seriously need some education yourself.

first of all, many mental illnesses can be managed quite well with drugs. Are you actually saying that a kid with depression shouldn't be mainstreamed? Ack. How about a kid with ADD? Or a kid with OCD? How about a kid who's bipolar?



you have no idea what you're talking about. None. It's, er, depressing.

[Nay]

14. Mental illnesses managed with drugs certainly was not my focus. I was addressing the article,

which described a boy who set fire to a bulletin board. Can we at least acknowledge that this boy may not belong in a classroom? That he may have other urges that endanger other children? Can we have a mental health expert evaluate whether he should remain in that classroom? Can we acknowledge that, maybe, just maybe, a teacher with 35 kids in her class may be unable to manage certain mentally-ill children and also attend to the learning needs of all the kids in the class?

And no, kids with managed depression, ADD, OCD, or medically-manageable bipolar should be fine in a classroom as long as they don't start burning up bulletin boards, etc. In my grandson's elementary school, such kids do fine and should stay right there as long as they don't exhibit behaviors that endanger other kids.

[Igel]

15. The law is the law.

But the law Congress passed may be bad, case law is worse yet.



1. Funding. Congress has all these requirements and has never fully funded the programs, as they promised. Doesn't matter. They're the law.

2. Regs. They're onerous and vindictive, but that's to avoid run-ins with the courts. They're multitudinous. There are entire bureaucracies whose job is to invent new reporting requirements.

3. Courts. Courts hear cases for individual's rights and the rest of society has no standing. So when a SpEd kid's rights and the rights of the other 29 students in the classroom class, guess whose wins? And often the teacher is stuck in the middle trying to find the compromise. Most compromises would be really bad if noticed. The administrators know this and avoid noticing. The case managers know what's going on and wag their fingers and make a note to cover their butts, but say nothing more.

Moreover, courts don't decide funding. Not their job. "Just do it."

I know the arguments for mainstreaming. You decide the criteria for what counts as "improved outcomes" and you have the results of your research. Grades? Not so much. "Improved understanding of others and their differences"? Sure. When there's a standardized test for "increased empathy" that counts towards AYP we can talk. And when "increasing understanding" is in the standards, with 15 days scattered throughout the year to be spent on that, wonderful. Until then the research criteria for most of that research aren't aligned with the standards and curriculum. The researchers need more "rigor".

I know the arguments for a lot of restrictions on SpEd classifications and on least restrictive environments. It's easy to abuse SpEd to make test scores look good, dispose of unwanted kids, etc. Times change. And improved procedures are needed.

In trials, there's sometimes a lack of evidence; if you convict wrongfully it can be really brutal. So you want to err on the side of caution. In education, if you remove a kid for six weeks and it's wrong he can be returned and caught up. If you slow down an entire class for six weeks, that's going to be harder to catch up--you can't tutor 150 kids after class. Then, when the high-stakes test happens, it means some of the kids who would have barely passed will fail.

[Brickbat]

4. His mother "has this expectation" because the state has been forcing schools to be the safety net

for years.

Ten years ago, a child with his mental and behavioral history might have been put in a group home with other mentally ill children and attended a day-treatment program for academic instruction and mental health services.

But in an attempt to keep children out of pricey treatment centers and hospitals, Minnesota changed directions in the past decade, pouring millions of dollars into early-intervention programs while cutting funding for longer-term care. The state now serves twice as many children as 10 years ago — 55,000 in 2010, but spending per child is down 47 percent.

“The average age of the children we’re serving has been going down,” said Chuck Johnson, deputy commissioner for policy and operations at the state Department of Human Services. “We’re getting ahead of the problems earlier.”

But, some top educators say, the state did not account for the needs of students with more serious mental problems. Those children now sometimes have no place to go for help when they break down, turning schools across Minnesota into de facto treatment centers.

The number of beds at residential treatment centers in the state has fallen 27 percent in the past decade. Counties also have cut funding for day-treatment care by 55 percent since 2007.

And whether schools should be providing these treatments or not, they certainly don't have the resources for it.

In a December 2010 e-mail to Gianni’s Anoka County social worker, Shameka pleaded for advice, saying her son “may not be ready for school and that perhaps a more psychiatric setup would be more appropriate for him.”

The social worker questioned the need for an out-of-home placement, suggesting that “maybe there have been too many changes within the last few months.” Instead, the county arranged for more therapeutic services. In July, the social worker noted in her log that the sessions were not going well because Gianni “is fighting it.”

The school district’s response to Gianni’s escalating behavior was to reduce his mental health services. In his second year, he received just 45 minutes of in-school therapy a week from a social worker, school records show. County and school officials declined to comment on Gianni’s care.

[Avalux]

6. It's tragic.

On top of everything else, there's no stability for Gianni. Stability, feeling safe, is essential if there's ever a chance to help him and others like him.

[HardTimes99]

5. There's no cure (thus far) for Anti-Social Personality Disorder, based on

my (admittedly) layperson's understanding of the disorder. The psychoactive drugs have limited and unpredicatable effects on adolescent and pre-adolescent brains.

Agree that we must try to find a better way, just not sure 'treatment' is realistic.

[Avalux]

7. Not treatment with drugs...

did you read the myriad of diagnoses with which Gianni has been branded? How on earth do drugs cure any of it? They don't, and 'success' is measured by whether or not the child 'behaves'.

Did you read the publication at the link I provided? Non drug treatments, such as meditation, which would teach the child from a young age to control his thoughts instead of the other way around, may be the way to go.

[HardTimes99]

8. My version of Adobe is having trouble chewing on your .pdf. I'll give it a spin as soon

as I get my Adobe issue sorted out.

[Neoma]

11. Cross post this to the Mental Health Information group?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=forum&id=1260

[The Straight Story]

12. Done (nt)