When Alice Bender started teaching as a 20-year-old in 1969, two of the students in her special education class at Richelieu Valley High School were older than she was.
She dealt with “everything” in her classroom – mentally handicapped students, bright kids with learning disabilities, teens with behavioural problems.
“Whoever didn’t fit was just thrown into that class,” said Bender, who retired as a principal in 2003.
As a novice teacher, Bender didn’t have all the answers, but said she believed there had to be a better way to teach students with special needs. “And to me, it wasn’t by putting them apart.”
“They hung around together, they caused problems. They were in the crappy part of the school,” Bender said.
The way Quebec schools educate students with special needs is far removed from that era. But the current approach, which favours integrating them in regular classes, still causes plenty of friction – so much so that it’s going under the microscope.
About 100 people from the province’s school system will gather in Quebec City on Monday for a forum, organized by Quebec’s Education Department, to take stock of the success of special needs students and their integration into regular classes.
“We have to ask ourselves questions because for the moment there’s no choice but to accept there are certain difficulties. That’s clear,” said Dave Leclerc, a spokesperson for Education Minister Line Beauchamp. “We’re open to any suggestion. It’s really a brainstorming.”
The segregation of special needs students came into question in the 1970s, when an increasing number were in the education system but were rarely integrated into regular classes or schools, notes a government document prepared for Monday’s forum. At the time, research results began to show that segregation did not provide better schooling. By the 1990s, the practice of integrating special needs students in regular classrooms had picked up steam.
Besides promoting social integration, proponents of inclusive schools argue that integration also promotes kindness among other students in the class.
Two years ago, Quebec’s education minister unveiled an action plan to promote success for special needs students. It promised guidelines for their successful integration into regular classrooms. But they’ve never been defined, said Manon Bernard, head of the Fédération des syndicats de l’enseignement. “We hope that we’ll succeed in establishing clear guidelines and limits to integration,” Bernard said.
Premier Jean Charest announced last spring that the government, though not looking at drastic measures, wanted to re-examine its policy of mainstreaming students.
Those kind of noises have some boosters of inclusion worried. Bender spent six years in the 1990s working with teachers in more than 300 English schools in Quebec, helping them to integrate special needs students.
“I’m afraid because I know from having seen it thousands of times, I know it can work,” Bender said.
Anik Larose, with the Association du Québec pour l’intégration sociale – which represents people with intellectual challenges – also worries it might mean a step back for integration. “When you put things in question, there’s always that risk,” said Larose, whose daughter has Down syndrome.
Serge Laurendeau says the first thing that should be asked at the forum is: “Have we gone too far – what are the limits to integration?”
For Laurendeau, head of the Quebec Provincial Association of Teachers, whose 8,000 members teach in Quebec’s English public schools, the answer to the first part of that questions is “Yes.”
No one opposes including all students in a regular setting for social reasons, Laurendeau said. “However, to integrate them into a regular class, that’s where the difficulty arises because some of them cannot cope with the academics.”
Those students would benefit more from being placed in a smaller group or special class for a certain amount of time, Laurendeau said.
He also charges that the way students are integrated doesn’t respect the Education Act.
“They take all the kids and put them in a regular class. But the law says you have to verify if it infringes on the other people’s rights. And that’s the analysis, which is not done.”
Although enrolment has dipped at Quebec schools, the number of special needs students has gone up. Last year, they made up 18.4 per cent of the student population, compared with 13.5 per cent in 2002-03. Of that amount last year, 65 per cent were integrated into regular classes. The government figures show a much higher percentage of special needs students integrated in English schools than French ones.
“We need people to understand inclusion isn’t a bad thing – that it does work and it works very successfully in our system,” said Debbie Horrocks, head of the Quebec English School Boards Association.
Nancy Heath, a professor in McGill University’s education faculty, says the way the system is structured is not effective or inclusive.
The system is based on the premise that everyone goes to their neighbourhood school, said Heath, who directed McGill’s inclusive education program from 2002 until last year and still teaches in the program. But strong students are going to private or specialized schools, leaving a disproportionate number of students with difficulties, she said.
“It’s just not the way inclusion needs to work, which is a certain number of kids with difficulties, a certain number of kids in the middle, a certain number of kids who are strong in any one domain.”
“Instead we see these schools that have now a ridiculous number of kids who are struggling,” Heath said.
Inclusion is “absolutely doable” without burning out teachers, Heath said. “However, the way it’s being done is burning out teachers and it’s turning parents off.”
Heath says she hears from other parents who feel their children, who don’t have special needs, are being held to the lowest common denominator because the teacher is teaching at a lower level to accommodate struggling students.
Cindy Finn, who sits on a committee of Quebec’s English school board administrators who deal with special needs, disagrees that inclusion isn’t working in the English system.
“Sometimes people don’t realize all the services that exist to support students with needs,” Finn added. “I think because we’ve just become accustomed to having psychologists and speech therapists and everyone in those schools. But that’s what they do on a weekly basis in those resource meetings – they’re discussing, they’re problem-solving, they’re trying to make a way to have a maximum amount of success.”
Better preparing future teachers to deal with special needs students was one of the measures called for in the Quebec government’s action plan in 2008.
“We do need to be thinking about teacher training and not just (university) training but ongoing training,” Finn said. “How do we help our teachers feel prepared.”
Beauchamp said the forum will be used to pinpoint difficulties related to integration, to agree on adjustments and the work to be done.
“[The education minister] wants to hear everyone who intervenes to try to find a solution – and the best solution possible,” Leclerc said.
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