The city of Providence, R.I., has shut down a program for intellectually disabled teenagers and adults after a U.S. Department of Justice investigation found that people in the program were working at manual labor for little or no pay.

The Harold A. Birch Vocational School program currently has an enrollment of 85, which accounts for virtually all of the students with intellectual and developmental disabilities in the 23,600-student district. WPRI, the CBS television affiliate serving Providence, has covered the issue extensively, and has a link to the 17-page letter from the Justice Department outlining the department's findings.

The vocational program violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, the letter noted: Students worked at jobs such as bagging and labeling items for 50 cents to $2 an hour, and were given few opportunities to find jobs paying competitive wages. Instead, most were funneled into another sheltered work program where they were again paid below-minimum wage. Disability law requires that such programs offer the "most integrated setting" possible.

WPRI reports that the state of Rhode Island and Providence will stop enrolling new students and adults in sheltered workshop programs. They will receive "supported employment" and integrated services that will allow them to work a traditional 40-hour week at competitive wages. In addition, the principal of the school has resigned.

Last year, advocacy groups representing people with disabilities in Oregon filed a class-action lawsuit against the state, saying that adults there were also working menial jobs for low pay, with no opportunity for integrated, competitive employment. Gov. John Kitzhaber, a Democrat, issued an executive order in April that would reduce funding to sheltered workshop programs and increase the number of people with developmental disabilities in the general workforce. (The text of the executive order is here.)

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The U.S. Department of Education is looking for parties interested in providing technical assistance related to the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act.

The first funding opportunity is for entities that will provide assistance to the parent training and information centers, which are IDEA-mandated organizations that help parents navigate the special education system. There are currently 100 parent centers nationwide.

The second opportunity is for a new center that will help states accurately collect and report IDEA data. (As I wrote a few weeks ago, changes are coming to the system that states use to collect data on students with disabilities.)

The parent information center funding opportunity would establish eight separate technical assistance centers: six regional centers, one Native American center, and one center that will work with all the parent assistance organizations, creating resources and serving as a repository of information.

The funding will be approximately $1.8 million for these technical assistance centers in their first year, and between $2.6 million and $2.7 million in years 2-5. The deadline to apply is July 18.

The second grant is for an organization that will run the National Technical Assistance Center To Improve State Capacity To Accurately Collect and Report IDEA Data, or Data Center for short. That center will be expected to provide a variety of support to states, including training modules and personalized support to data managers. The education department has $6.5 million available for the center's first year, and the deadline to apply is July 19.

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The shortage in educators trained in special education is an old story, but the Minneapolis Star Tribune provides depth to the issue in an recent article which notes that while more than 800 special education teachers quit in last school year, only 417 new special educator teaching licenses were granted in that timeframe.

As a result, the state is relying more on teachers who do not have special education training, teachers are traveling hundreds of miles to provide services at far-flung schools, and specialists are working with students over the Internet, the article says. The piece also notes the paperwork burden on teachers, and the fears they have of some of their students, who may have problems with aggression. From the piece:

"These are some of the hardest jobs in teaching," said St. Paul attorney Amy Goetz, who has built a law practice fighting on behalf of special ed students. "They should be some of the most well-supported people, but they're not. ... Instead, we starve them of resources and they burn out."

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The Chicago Tribune reports that Illinois is considering getting rid of certain decades-old state regulations in order to get more students with disabilities educated alongside their typically developing peers. From the article:

The proposed changes could affect students both with and without disabilities in virtually every public school in Illinois and open the door for more disabled students in mainstream classes—a key goal of federal special education law, state officials say. ...

The proposals, expected to be discussed in June and voted on in August by the Illinois State Board of Education, have generated an unprecedented response—much of it critical. Those who fear class sizes will increase, special education teachers and aides will be laid off, and children will be hurt have bombarded state officials with thousands of letters and comments.

The article illustrates a tension between the mandate in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which says that students should be taught in the least restrictive environment that meets their needs; and parents who believe that their children won't get the special attention they need in large, general education classrooms.

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New Hampshire-based filmmaker Dan Habib, whose first documentary, "Including Samuel," chronicled the life of his family, which includes a son with cerebral palsy, is back with another film that talks about restraint and seclusion from the perspective of students.

Tonight's premiere of "Restraint and Seclusion: Hear our Stories" marks the kickoff of the Stop Hurting Kids campaign, an effort by a coalition of 26 disability advocacy groups to stop the use of restraint and seclusion as a means to curb disruptive behavior.

In addition to "Including Samuel," Habib also produced a film last year on a student with behavioral difficulties, called "Who Cares About Kelsey?" It was that film where Habib learned about some of the behavior management techniques that can help conflicts from escalating to the point where restraint or seclusion is considered necessary, Habib said in an interview.

Representatives from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), and TASH, an advocacy group for people with people with severe disabilities, approached Habib late last year with request that he make a film on the issue from a youth perspective. The documentary features five current and former students and their families talking about their experiences being restrained at school. "It was devastating to film these people talking about what they endured," Habib said.

Restraint and seclusion practices have been under national scrutiny. My colleague, Nirvi Shah, wrote last year about the first-ever Senate hearing on the topic, which also outlined alternatives to the practice. The Stop Hurting Kids campaign is supporting legislation that would prohibit restraint or seclusion unless it is a last resort to prevent an immediate threat to the student or to others.

The campaign plans to host a 5 p.m. live stream of the movie and a discussion panel that will include Habib; Michael Yudin, the acting assistant secretary of the office of special education and rehabilitative services; and Larke Huang, who leads the trauma and justice strategic initiative for SAMHSA. The film will be permanently available for viewing on the Stop Hurting Kids website.

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U.S. Rep. John Kline, a Republican from Minnesota and the chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, says that the Obama administration's proposed education budget prioritizes "pet projects, unauthorized programs, and new initiatives" over increased special education spending.

In a letter to a House appropriations subcommittee, Kline echoes a much-used talking point from special education advocates: the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act authorized the federal government to pay for up to 40 percent of the cost of educating students with disabilities, but the actual amount appropriated by Congress hasn't come close to that. Currently, the federal contribution to the cost of special education nationwide is about 18 percent. From the letter:

As our nation struggles with debt levels that have eclipsed the size of the entire U.S. economy, difficult choices must be made. We must stop wasting taxpayer dollars on new and ineffective programs and instead work on meeting our basic obligation to ensure special needs children are prepared for success after high school.

It's hard not to think that Kline is taking aim, in part, at the administration's brand-new $75 billion proposal to bolster early-education programs in the states. The lawmaker's response to the preschool proposal was that he was looking for "substantive details."

But Kline is not alone in wanting more money for formula-funded programs such as special education and Title I. Those programs have generally seen their funding kept level in recent years, while the Obama administration has poured money into competitive grant programs such as Race to the Top. My colleague Alyson Klein wrote recently that Democratic senators were becoming less pleased with this approach.

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The rates of autism for students of all races is on the increase, but students who are black, Hispanic, or American Indian are less likely to be identified with the disability compared to white and Asian students, according to a study published this month in The Journal of Special Education.

The study, "A Multiyear National Profile of Racial Disparity in Autism Identification," compiled information collected by the federal government from 1998 to 2006 on the race and disability category of students in special education. Using that information, the researchers were able to calculate a "risk index," or the percentage of all enrolled students from a racial group with a specific disability.

The overall risk of being categorized as having autism increased for all racial groups over that time period, from 0.09 percent to 0.37 percent. That increase reflects the increase in autism prevalence.

However, white students were twice as likely to be identified as having an autism spectrum disorder as students who were Hispanic or American Indian/Alaska Native. For Hispanic and American Indian students, the likelihood of autism diagnosis lagged behind the rate for students overall for every year researchers examined.

In 1998 and 1999, black students were more likely than the overall student population to be categorized as having autism. But for the rest of the years captured by the study, they became less likely than the overall student population to carry that diagnosis. In other words, though every group's rate was going up, the rates of groups other than black students was increasing much faster. That switch from overrepresentation to underrepresentation was "pretty remarkable," said study lead author Jason Travers, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The data don't explain why this might be happening, but some hypotheses are that minority students are being diagnosed with disabilities other than autism or they may be getting identified later than their white peers.

Asian students' risk of being diagnosed with autism is also higher than that of the overall student population for all of the years that were studied, coming very close to the risk index for white students.

Potential underrepresentation matters, Travers said, because early identification and treatment of autism is considered essential for best outcomes. (I explored this issue in an April blog post, also on minority underrepresentation.)

Assessing and identifying minority students "requires a great deal of cultural competence, to ensure disadvantaged children are not restricted from early intervention services," he said.

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The long-awaited fifth revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM-5, was released last weekend by the American Psychiatric Assocation with several revisions that affect conditions such as autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that are common in school contexts.

The manual was last published in 1994 and updated in 2000. Many of these changes reflected in the DSM-5 have been the subject of widespread debate for several months. The diagnostic criteria also have potential to affect schools, though the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act has its own definitions of disabilities covered under special education law.

Among the changes is the removal of Asperger syndrome, and other subsets of autism such as childhood disintegrative disorder and "pervasive development disorder-not otherwise specified." Those disorders will now be folded into the larger category of autism spectrum disorders. The new manual also creates a "social communication disorder" to reflect the experience of people who have trouble communicating but do not have repetitive behavior sometimes associated with autism. The DSM-5 fact sheet on autism spectrum disorders explains the rationale behind the changes; the advocacy group Autism Speaks has also created a FAQ document on the DSM-5 changes.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder also has some new diagnostic criteria, namely, that the symptoms must have been present before the age of 12. The earlier manual required that the symptoms must have been present before the age of 7. The new manual also says ADHD should not be diagnosed when the symptoms are better attributed to another disorder, such as bipolar disorder or anxiety.

Other changes have been made to the diagnosis and terminology of intellectual disability, specific learning disorder, and conduct disorder.

Stay tuned for an upcoming article on what these changes may mean for parents and educators.

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Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder leads the list of mental health issues captured in the first-ever report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention intended to monitor the mental health of youth ages 3 to 17.

The report, which uses information compiled from several different monitoring sources, found that about 8 percent of the youth in this population had ever been diagnosed with ADHD, as reported by their parents. The next most-frequent mental health disorder was "behavior or conduct problems" at 3.5 percent, and anxiety at 3 percent.

The report found that 13 percent to 20 percent of children living in the United States experience a mental disorder in a given year (the varying percentages are because of the different sources of information,) and the disorders appear to be growing more prevalent. Mental health treatment has an estimated annual cost of $247 billion, which includes the cost of special education, use of the juvenile justice system, and decreased productivity.

The report noted what many parents and educators already know: Many of these disorders can be present at the same time. For example, ADHD, "oppositional defiance disoder," and conduct disorders often co-exist.

Knowing how often these disorders occur is the first step in targeting resources to assist families and communities, the report said. My colleague, Nirvi Shah, who covers school climate issues, has pulled out additional statistics from the report.

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A state-by-state analysis of the most recent data on graduation rates for students with learning disabilities shows that while more of those students have been leaving high school with a standard diploma, many states are struggling to reach the national graduation rate average of 68 percent for students in that disability category.

Students with learning disabilities—dyslexia, dyscalculia, or auditory or visual processing disorders, for example—make up about 41 percent of the students who are covered under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The New York-based National Center for Learning Disabilities combed through the data collected by the federal government on students with disabilities to produce a report called "Diplomas at Risk," which argues that despite improvement over the years, far too many students with learning disabilities, or SLDs, are dropping out of school or being shunted to an alternative certification path that leads to something other than a standard diploma.

"While things are moving in the right direction, we don't think we're moving in the right direction fast enough," said Candace Cortiella, the director of the Advocacy Institute and the report's author. "Some states have significant problems that need to be addressed."

The "Diplomas At Risk" page on the NCLD website will get you to the report after a free registration process. Registration will also allow the organization to invite you to a webinar discussing the findings at noon EST tomorrow.

Digging Into the Data

The exit data collected on students with disabilities includes only those who were covered by the IDEA when they left high school. Students who transferred into general education are not included in the calculation, even if they received special education services for most of their school career. The most recent data is for the 2010-11 school year.

The 68 percent rate of students leaving high school with a standard diploma marks an increase from 57 percent in the 2001-02 school year. But 17 states were below the 68 percent national average. Nevada, at 25 percent, had the lowest rate of SLDs earning a regular diploma.

Nationwide, the dropout rate for SLDs was 19 percent. But 22 states had dropout rates higher than the national average; South Carolina, at 49 percent, had the highest dropout rate.

Many states allow students with disabilities to leave school with some sort of completion document that does not meet the same requirements as a standard diploma. In Mississippi, the percentage of SLDs earning an alternative certification approached 60 percent.

The report also calculated graduation rates using the new "adjusted cohort graduation rate," which the U.S. Department of Education required for the first time in 2010-11. While students with disabilities are calculated separately for the purposes of comparison, they are not broken out by disability categories. States also have different ways of deciding who counts as a student with a disability, making comparisons across states difficult.

However, the calculations showed a wide graduation gap in some states—in Mississippi, for example, 75 percent of all students earned a diploma under this measurement, compared to 23 percent of students with disabilities, a gap of 52 percentage points. In South Dakota, the graduation rate for all students matched the rate for students with disabilities, at about 83 percent.

Recommendations for Policymakers

The report offered several possible explanations for the graduation rate disparities. For example, schools may decide as early as elementary school to take a student off a regular diploma track. States with multiple high school completion options also tended to be states that had a lower percentage of SLDs earning regular diplomas.

The NCLD said that states should consider limiting how many alternate certification paths are available. Other policy recommendations were to use the adjusted cohort rate for students by disability category, to enable more accurate tracking of the issue. States should also create incentives for school districts to tackle graduation rate disparities, the report says.

And districts need to avoid steering students into paths that lead to less exposure to the general curriculum, said Laura Kaloi, the public policy director for the NCLD.

"In some states, you can decide as early as 2nd or 3rd grade whether to go into an alternate assessment. You're making a decision very early that THE?--MB child will not have full access to the general curriculum," she said. Students with learning disabilities "absolutely should be part of the regular classroom, with the support and services they need."

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