NEWS | EDUCATION
Teacher Stephanie Robinette (center) says many of her students have risen to the challenge of regular classrooms.
JENNIFER DEBARROS PHOTO
“NO LONGER SPECIAL,” CONTINUED... a dry-erase message on the whiteboard in a CAP class reads on a Friday. “You can do it!” Stephanie Robinette, a young teacher, tutors students as they huddle around laptops and scrawl on worksheets. “These kids have been told almost their whole career that they can only do so much,” says Robinette, “and I know that that’s not true.” One student, Michael Webb, says he started out hating reading — but by the end of the year he says he’d read five books, including Romeo and Juliet and To Kill a Mockingbird. Special ed teachers like Robinette are assigned specific students, tracking them to make sure they don’t fail, drop out or slip through the cracks. And since the number of resource courses has been cut in half, many special ed teachers have been placed in general classes as a sort of highly qualified teacher’s aide. They relearn the course material beside the special ed students, offering them additional tutoring and attention.
Naturally, there have been disagreements and personality clashes between some teachers, but science teacher Tyrone Hoard says the partnership has been invaluable. “You get some of those, you know, ADHD kids, and you’re just like, man, I don’t know how to work with them,” says Hoard. But the special ed teachers do. In many cases, Hoard says, the students have surprised him. “Some of the kids are amazing, I would never have known they were special ed kids if I wasn’t told.”
L
ori Shauvin, a special ed teacher at Rogers for 15 years, walks the halls with a brisk intensity. “Do you want my truthful opinion?” Shauvin says when asked about the new inclusion model. “I think it’s a bunch of crap.” Shauvin quickly tempers her criticism. The new CAP classes let her get to know students, she says, and special ed students at the fourthgrade reading level and above have excelled.
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14 INLANDER JUNE 20, 2013