Advocates say it's time Sonoma County's special education students no longer excluded from their peers

This is the second in a two-part series Read the first story here.

An outdoor pavilion in the middle of one of Santa Rosa’s biggest high schools was the stage — literally — for a moment in Ryan Woodard’s K-12 journey that he won’t forget.

It was May of his junior year at Montgomery High School and his favorite song, “Rock Your Body” by Justin Timberlake was playing out of the loudspeakers at lunch.

Moved by the song and his love for music, Ryan got up and started dancing. Someone handed him a microphone, triggering an impromptu performance.

“People were screaming ‘Yay! I love you!’” he said. “People were going crazy and all the students came in close.”

“It was a beautiful moment,” said Laura Woodard, Ryan’s mom. “They all in that moment finally accepted Ryan for him. He is different, he has autism, but they were (still) so welcoming to him.”

But before that instant, Ryan, who was recently profiled in The Press Democrat after singer and songwriter John Mayer sent him a guitar, had been mostly excluded, ignored or bullied by his general education peers, Laura Woodard said.

Schools have forgotten to send them invites to family events, she said, and some have neglected to send them emergency alerts. He didn’t always have opportunities to mix with those outside his circle, and, his mother said, some general education teachers did not always show him much compassion.

It's an all-too-familiar feeling for other students with disabilities like Ryan, and their parents who advocate for more opportunities for their children to be included in their school’s mainstream population.

The move to reintegrate students with special education needs into the general population has been taking place across the nation.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 2004 emphasize school accountability in ensuring that students with disabilities have access to regular classrooms and are successful with the regular education curriculum.

But a 2020 Policy Analysis for California Education report shows Sonoma County is far behind.

In the 2017-18 school year, California had one of the lowest inclusion rates for students with disabilities in the country: 56% compared to a national average of 63.4%.

And the U.S. Department of Education found in 2017 that only 6% of California students with intellectual disabilities spent 80% or more of their school day in the general education classroom.

Parents and special education advocates in Sonoma County say inclusion is finally gaining momentum, and a “mindset shift” is taking place.

But they say their fight has only just begun.

Sonoma County’s special education landscape

When a child is first diagnosed with special needs, there are several options for families when sending their children to school.

They can stay within their school district, like Ryan Woodard, who is now a senior at Montgomery in the Santa Rosa City Schools District.

“When I was three years old, I was diagnosed with autism and couldn’t communicate or talk well until I was 10,” Ryan said.

He has been a part of special education classes since preschool. He was first categorized as a student with moderate to severe needs because he was nonverbal for much of his adolescence. In sixth grade, he was transferred to a mild to moderate special day class.

Placing a student in either a “mild to moderate” or “moderate to severe” special education class — the two categories a district uses to assess the type of services each student needs — is determined by an individualized education assessment.

Many schools have “special day classes” that separate students with special needs into classrooms with special education teachers and aides. These classrooms are often physically separated on the campus.

Ryan has attended seven different schools since preschool because of the shifting enrollment of special education students, which makes it difficult to keep students at the same school.

When school districts feel they are not equipped to handle students with unique or severe disabilities, they send them to programs run by the Sonoma County Office of Education or to nonpublic schools.

Districts pay their tuition and transportation, to ensure that students can receive specialized education from highly trained teachers with more resources at their disposal.

SCOE’s special education classes, which are located on district campuses, cost the districts $84,000 per pupil for the school year. Eric Wittmershaus, the office’s communication director, said that is the maximum amount, and most often the number is offset by state funds and amended if the student’s costs turn out to be lower than expected.

Like some district special day classes, SCOE classrooms are usually blocked off from the main campus. The separation allows for specialized accommodations, like having their own playgrounds with disability modifications.

SCOE Special Education Teacher Annamarie Anselmi’s classroom is housed on the San Miguel Elementary campus. She teaches students from third to sixth grade with a range of disabilities classified as moderate to severe.

While the playground is “super safe,” Anselmi said, it can be isolating for her students.

“I have been advocating very strongly for more inclusive opportunities on campus,” Anselmi said.

She and other special education teachers are in talks with the administration at San Miguel to bring back an expired “buddies” program, which paired older, general education students with her special education students, providing playtime opportunities and integrating the children together.

“It's a really great lead into inclusion, because you're learning these play skills, you're learning how to take turns, the other gen ed kids are modeling appropriate behavior and how to conflict manage in a way that is something that we work on all year long,” Anselmi said. “When we have these inclusive opportunities, it's like we're practicing it in real time.”

These programs are optional, and based on the bandwidth of a district to support them. After the COVID-19 shutdowns, the buddies programs ended at San Miguel and have not yet been reinstated.

New plans for inclusion underway

Some districts are reinventing the special day programs altogether, expanding their special education services and adding their own programs for students with disabilities who they didn’t previously cater to.

The Common Ground Society, a nonprofit geared toward inclusion and founded by local advocate Larkin O’Leary, has been pushing SCOE and the Sonoma County Special Education Local Plan Area, which includes 44 districts, to work together to provide teachers with stipends for teacher training on inclusion.

A major push by O’Leary is for the Universal Design for Learning, a framework that provides a learning space that is accommodating to all students. The idea is that instead of giving one student an adaptive tool because they need it, every student gets the opportunity to use that tool.

“All kids in preschool could benefit from help with fine motor activities and all kids could benefit from some speech therapy,” Larkin said.

Providing assistive technologies, one-on-one mentorships, goal setting and allowing students to complete assignments in formats that appeal to their learning style are all adaptive options under the universal design.

With a recent roll out of an early education grant geared toward preschools, younger learners now have more access to inclusion practices than most.

The Inclusive Early Education Expansion Program has been adapted at three preschools so far: one in the Petaluma School District and two in the Rincon Valley School District. An inclusive preschool in the West Side Union School District is still in the works, said Susan Langer, a program specialist with the Sonoma County Special Education Local Plan Area.

O’Leary and Langer say that more expansion beyond preschools is needed and should continue. They hope that staff in both special education and general education programs work together to provide an inclusive learning environment for all.

For the past two years at Santa Rosa City Schools, special education program managers have been working to provide new programs for students with special needs. They’ve established and grown six classrooms at Lincoln Elementary School and three at Albert Biella for students with severe disabilities, said Katya Robinson, the special education program manager for Santa Rosa City Schools.

“It’s a mindset shift here,” Robinson said. “The previous understanding of an inclusion kid is ‘you're an inclusion kid, you’re special ed.’ But our mind shift here is basically ‘you’re a general ed kid with these given supports here.’”

This is all in an effort to keep their students in the district, ease their transition to general education and provide students with opportunities to be among their peers. It also saves the district a lot of money.

The program works like a “revolving door,” Robinson said, where students enrolled in special education can participate in general education because the school sites have supportive systems in place to keep an eye on them.

"It's a little bit more how education should be,“ Robinson said. ”When a child has those early intervention skills and is able to access Gen Ed … we want that free flowing kind of movement between those two classrooms.”

Also new to Robinson’s team of specialized educators is Behavioral Specialist Maddie Sinclair, who has been working to train general and special education teachers on the ways to identify behaviors of students with special needs, better prepping these teachers for when the classroom doors open to all Lincoln and Albert Biella students.

"A lot of it is implementing (training) beforehand,“ Sinclair said. ”It helps prevent those behaviors from happening, but then we also teach them what to do if (those behaviors) do happen and how we come in and keep everyone safe during everything.“

There are five behavioral specialists implemented with similar plans of action across Santa Rosa City Schools as of this academic year.

Langer said this is the first time the County is really coming together in an organized way to increase inclusion in schools, mostly, she says thanks to O’Leary’s advocacy.

Previously a teacher in the Rincon Valley School District, O’Leary planned the birth of her son in 2014, in hopes to continue teaching the following year without taking too much time off.

But, then her son James was born with Down syndrome, and was rushed away for heart surgery in the first week of his life. He had more than 30 surgeries and spent hundreds of days in the hospital.

After three years of juggling teaching and managing James’s medical battles, she felt she had to resign from Rincon Valley Charter School.

“Eventually he was able to do all of this stuff that I just never assumed people with Down syndrome or disabilities could learn,” she said.

“Common Ground (tries) to create a collaborative effect to inclusion because oftentimes, the barrier is that uncomfortable feeling. Our motto is to push past those feelings of discomfort and fear and get to know someone behind the label.”

The organization recently hit the milestone of reaching 50,000 students with their presentation about inclusion and finding similarities among fellow students, instead of getting hung up on their differences.

“The way that inclusion benefits kids without disabilities is you understand that in life, all people are different, and you don't just get to work with people that are like you,” O’Leary said. “That we are all different. And everybody has something beautiful to bring to the world.”

Report For America corps member Adriana Gutierrez covers education and child welfare issues for The Press Democrat. Reach her at Adriana.Gutierrez@PressDemocrat.com

You can reach Staff Writer Alana Minkler at 707-526-8531 or alana.minkler@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @alana_minkler.