Op-ed: Oregon fails rural schools who need help teaching children with disabilities

By Joel Greenberg

You may not know it, but many Oregon children don't attend full days of school for months or years at a time because of behavior problems caused by disabilities. Increasingly, this happens in small rural districts located far from the expert behavioral help found in the state's bigger cities.

We know that with that expert help, virtually all of these children could attend a full day of school and learn. Instead, forced to spend the day at home in hopes the behavior will improve, the students rarely learn anything. Some are removed from school altogether and given an hour or two of tutoring per day, a plan that robs them of the opportunities to learn and practice social skills with other children.

You may picture a large, angry 17-year old boy when you think about a child so out of control that he or she isn't allowed to be in school for more than an hour or two. Sometimes, that's accurate. But our caseload tells us that many of those children weigh 60 pounds soaking wet. We have open cases with children who are receiving short school days at ages 5 and 6.

Behaviors that result in shortened days are as varied as the ages and sizes of the children. They range from ritualistic pinching and funny noises to full on aggression with punches and kicks. Far less varied is what happens when these kids are removed from school for long periods.

They fall behind academically and don't get to practice the social skills that are key to better control. The behaviors worsen and parents miss work so they can be home to watch their children. Jobs are lost and marriages fall apart. Some parents must choose between homelessness and giving up a child to state custody, which can mean special schools and programs that are far away and cost tax-payers thousands per month.

We don't know the size of the short school day problem because the Oregon Department of Education doesn't collect relevant data. But we estimate that it affects thousands of children each year.

More concerning is that the education department refuses to consider its responsibility to help rural districts. To the extent the agency addresses the issue, the Oregon Department of Education relies on guidance and a complaint system that allows well-resourced parents to seek better services -- often by punishing a district that has violated special education law. We know that those measures aren't fixing the problem because it is growing.

The education department should create a small cadre of on-call behavior and communication experts who could travel to rural districts for tough cases. They would analyze a child's behavior and provide short-term training, modeling and technical assistance for families and school staff. And they could remain available for remote troubleshooting if needed.

This model would boost district expertise by teaching district staff how to help an individual child. Admittedly, it wouldn't be cheap to create and operate such a team, but we believe that the associated expense would pale in comparison to the cost borne by the families of children who sit at home and become more and more difficult to educate or control.

It would also be dwarfed by the cost that all of us share when the behavioral needs of children are unattended until they become the adults who fill our prisons and hospitals.

Joel Greenberg is an attorney with Disability Rights Oregon. He lives in Southwest Portland.