Some Parents Push For Alternative to D.C.'s Special-Ed

Sharpe and St. Coletta are strikingly different.

Sharpe, with 187 students, ages 3 to 21, is a placid place. During a visit, classrooms had as few as three pupils and no more than nine. Besides the teacher, an aide or two was often present. Some children were attended to; other appeared to be waiting for attention.

St. Coletta hums with energy and activity. At times during a visit, it seemed as though every child was being attended to by an individual teacher or therapist. And the school costs: as much as $54,000 per student, compared with the $33,000 it costs the city to educate a child at Sharpe. St. Coletta is paid based on the needs of the students and the services the school provides; Sharpe is funded based on a standard per-pupil formula.

More than half of St. Coletta's students have individual aides. The result is that a typical classroom of 10 children will have a teacher and four or five aides, along with therapists who assist.

Sharpe's Lewis said that with fewer therapists and an average ratio of one teacher and one aide for every eight to 10 students, the school cannot match St. Coletta in providing individual attention.

Shawn requires one-on-one attention. He needs help even in simple cutting or painting exercises, according to his occupational therapist at St. Coletta, Jan Pascual. But for his first few months at St. Coletta, he rebuffed the hand-over-hand assistance he needed, Pascual recalled. "He would pull his arms away from you," she said.

Now, he accepts such help, Pascual said. And when he is working with someone or when his name is called, he responds and makes eye contact with the person, something he did not do early on.

"If I'm singing to him, he'll be looking at me directly in the eyes," she said. "He's more alert in the classroom. Just say there's a sound or he hears someone talking -- he'll look in that direction."

Those signs often leave Pascual wondering where Shawn's progress could have been today. "Imagine," she said, "if he had had therapy for a few years."

In fact, it might be too late to teach some skills. Chewing and swallowing, for example, are especially hard to teach this far along, and in Shawn's case might never be learned, Pascual said. It is the sort of lost opportunity that pains Stephanie Reed, 33, a single mother of three.

Shawn wound up at St. Coletta thanks largely to the intervention of Deborah Ann Smith, who was a Children's Hospital social worker, and Tracy L. Goodman and Laura N. Rinaldi of the Children's Law Center, who help parents advocate for their children's medical needs.

The attorneys tried to prod Sharpe into resuming therapy. When those efforts yielded little, Shawn's mother appealed to the school system but lost. School officials maintained that they were exercising their best professional judgment and that they were working in the best interests of Shawn.

The case then headed to U.S. District Court, where Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly delivered a decision in August, writing: "The Court finds that his educational program at Sharpe has been inadequate."

Devoting so much of her attention to Shawn has not been easy on Reed, who said she hasn't worked for about three years because few jobs would afford her the flexibility she needs to care for Shawn and his siblings, Leshawndon, 13, and Rayshawn, 12. "There have been times when I thought I couldn't do it," she said. "Shawn needs so much attention. . . . There were times when I would sit here and cry. But then he would do something and make me smile."

Shawn's progress at St. Coletta, recorded in his "What I Did Today" notebook and in school correspondences to his mother, can seem modest. "Shawn was observed," one entry reads, "pushing a ball back and forth with a classmate with occasional hand over hand assistance."

But that is what gives Stephanie Reed hope.