Last Updated: September 24. 2010 10:57AM
Special ed left behind
No buses, no school for Detroit Public Schools' neediest
Marisa Schultz / The Detroit News
Detroit
The autistic 16-year-old fidgets with his fingers, gets up from the couch and heads to the bathroom to fill a glass of water. He sits back down for a while, rubs his fingers then moves to a kitchen chair, scratching his knee.
It's 6:37 a.m. -- the time the school bus should be at his northwest Detroit home. A bus is heard in the distance and his mother leaps up and helps him put on his Spider-Man backpack. But like every other day for nearly three weeks, this bus didn't come for Alonzo.
While other children in Detroit Public Schools started instruction Sept. 7, Alonzo has yet to go to class.
A lack of transportation, confusion over school assignments and problems with staffing have frustrated families with special needs students. This comes despite the district's efforts to streamline transportation by outsourcing busing and hiring a New York firm to make special education more efficient.
Nearly 1 in 5 DPS students requires special education services, according to the state. Lack of transportation is particularly troubling for students with disabilities whose Individualized Education Program assessment that details which services, therapies and teaching goals a student will get, calls for "curb to curb" busing, as is the case with Alonzo.
Alonzo's school, Cooley North, which housed special education classes, closed this year along with 29 others in the face of budget cuts. He was assigned to another special education school, Jerry L. White. Thirty minutes after he left home the bus brought him back since the school doesn't offer an autistic education program, said his mother, Allene Griffith, 53.
That set off a series of phone calls, voice mails, no answers and eventually a new assignment to Central High School, a traditional neighborhood school. Alonzo had previously been separated from a general school population. He struggles to grasp a pencil and has no effective means of communication. His mother wonders how her son will get the same level of service at Central.
But first he needs to get there.
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From The Detroit News:
http://www.detnews.com/article/20100924/SCHOOLS/9240378/1408/local/No-buses--no-school-for-Detroit-Public-Schools--neediest#ixzz10T3YQ7GI