For many parents and teachers throughout the Tristate, nearing the end of the school year brings more than plans for camp and summer vacations.

        It's IEP (Individualized Educational Program) meeting time for parents whose kids have disabilities, a time when everyone involved in a child's education sit down together to map out and agree upon what the vital elements of next year's education will be.

        The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (originally the All Handicapped Children's Act, passed by Congress in 1975) guarantees every child the right to an education in the “least restrictive environment.”

        Put simply, that means that kids with disabilities get to go to school and learn alongside their nondisabled peers.

A hard-fought battle

        That might sound like a no- brainer to some who take some of today's hard-won civil rights for granted, but it hasn't always been so. When I was in graduate school, one of my best friends had never been to school at all before coming to a major state university as a college freshmen. Her degenerative disease, a form of muscular dystrophy, had led to braces and crutches, then a wheelchair, and her public school had found it easier to tell her to stay home than to figure out how to get her up the stairs.

        It was legal to do that 30 years ago, and thus her education took place at home, not like the preferred home schooling of many today, but as a necessity with a string of hired tutors.

        For me, the cards fell very differently, and it is that pack of memories that I bring with me to the table when participating in a child's IEP.

Additional tools

        The purpose of the IEP is to ensure that children with disabilities will receive an equal education, but will have any additional tools or techniques required to reach the same end. The inclusion of a sign-language interpreter, aide or personal care assistant might be needed to help a student bridge the gap in learning or being ready to learn in the classroom.

        Speech therapy, remedial reading or occupational therapy are other possible provisions. Large-print books, Braille books, or an assistive listening device worn by teacher and student are tools that can connect a vision- or hearing-impaired student to the learning environment.

        Spelling out the goals and necessary steps to reach them can be overwhelming for both parent and teacher planning one more year of a child's future.

        There is so much to consider, and so much expertise required. None of us as parents, after all, are given instruction manuals for raising our children, and for the parent who is abruptly introduced to disability through the needs of a child, the scrambling to “get it right” is even greater than for the rest of us.

        Laws and specialists responsible for bringing all children into the classroom are wonderful additions to the lives and expectations of kids with disabilities. Still, as I review my own childhood and adolescence before such laws and specialists, there is a vital ingredient missing.

        That ingredient is friendship, playmates, hanging out on the playground and taking the good with the bad along with all the other kids. After a few early years of additional training in such vital areas as reading and writing Braille, I moved with my family to a school district where no “specialists” were available. I am more thankful with every year for the education I received. No specialists, no IEP and almost no tools to make learning easier.

        Still, when it came time to play kickball or plan a first boy-girl party, have slumber parties or trade tidbits about the hottest rock stars, I was there.

        Planning children's futures can be a heady experience. My plea to parents and students sitting at those tables this spring is this: Even if you need to leave out a session with an apparently critical specialist to ensure that your child will be at recess, in the cafeteria, or in gym class surrounded by children, it's a risk worth taking.

        No one wrote “friends” and “socialization” into my IEP because we didn't have such plans then. The gift of my education, though, was that by merely being placed in the same environment as other kids, with adaptation as only a background fabric, I enjoyed the most important part of every child's education: learning to be apart of the human family.

       Contact Deborah Kendrick at 673-4474; fax: 321-6430; e-mail: dkkendrick@earthlink.net. Cincinnati.Com keyword: Kendrick.

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