Good Evening. My name is Sue Sargeant and I live in Salem District off Harrison Road. I represent the Arc of Rappahannock. I thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight about the Arc’s concern with the county’s elimination of the Developmental Delay (DD) NAME Option at special education eligibility for our 5-8 year olds. I also appreciate that you are a concerned group of folks who give of your time to support ALL of our students in this caring and flexible quality school system.  You are willing to listen.

Simply put-The Arc wants that DD NAME option at Eligibility to remain in Spotsy because it opens more doors to the general ed classroom for our vulnerable children with disabilities who are in that ever-changing, evolving developmental period of  5-8 years old. Virginia and Spotsy  work hard to support young children. Look at how we go above federal requirement and are the only state to begin public education for our 2 yr olds with developmental delays. Let’s continue to do the right thing for our young children. Please return the DD NAME option for the 5-8s in Spotsy.

It does not matter that Fairfax or Loudoun, have already been limiting their age range to the 2-5 yr olds so those of us in other schools should just go along with them. This is wrong for these systems to do despite their (mis)perception that young  children at age 5 can be appropriately identified into those disability category ‘sorts’ of e.g., ‘Mental Retardation/Intellectual Disability vs Learning Disability (significant auditory processing deficit). These babies haven’t even had exposure to the 3 R’s reading, writing, arithmetic curriculum yet. How can we possibly say that they have Mental Retardation and not a Developmental Delay when they don’t do well on an IQ test? The National Assn for the Ed of Young Children and the Division for Early Childhood of the Council for Exceptional Children both have platforms on maintaining DD for the 5-8s because this is such a key developmental age period for a young child to learn new skills and overcome a disability.

The Arc realizes that Spotsy is concerned about the overidentification of students into special education. We are too! But eliminating the DD NAME option to cut back on  Over-identification is faulty reasoning. There was no data presented to support this irrational hypothesis.  The excuse that ‘Fairfax County Schools does it so it must be OK’ also falls flat because Fairfax County is a wealthier school system with a larger tax base and decades ago Fairfax implemented a model of staffing its schools with “Inclusion Specialists’ (or some other similarly titled teacher) to provide in-class supports for its general ed teachers. Spotsy does not yet do this. It has one MARS specialist for the entire county. Fairfax also uses other ‘soft’ labels, like “OHI-Other Health Impairment’ and SLI-Speech Impairment to describe children between the ages of 5-8 yrs old at Eligibility. But during this past year of re-testing IQs and re-sorting hundreds of DD children, Spotsy has increased its use of the ‘harsh’ label ”Mental Retardation/ Intellectual Disability” to describe young children between the ages of 5-8 years old who have developmental delays.

So Arc agrees, there’s a problem with over-identification. But eliminating the DD NAME option is not the answer. It’s worth checking into to see if the referral rate to sped goes down if one was to simply present to school faculty how important it is for a child  to access and remain in the general ed curriculum, using some of those techniques taught in that wonderful Professional Development class on Universal Design. And  then just tell teachers that they don’t need to ‘be covering all their bases’ by making a referral to sped Child Study and that they aren’t going to take a hit if students in their class don’t pass the SOLs and their school misses AYP.

Back in 1978, I was a full time grad student at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. We read Jane Mercer’s work on labeling plus this book, “Johnny’s Such a Bright Boy, What  A Shame He’s Retarded”. The whole concept of the danger of early mis-labeling permeated each of our classes. We could all cite sections of Lloyd Dunn’s 1964 classic article “Special Ed: Is Much of It Justifiable?” to drum into our young heads that despite good intentions of well meaning but uninformed ‘specialists’ that labels and mis-labels harm children’s opportunities for a bright educational future. That ‘sticks and stone may break my bones but names can really hurt me’.  The Arc does not want these young 5-8 year olds ‘tracked’ into homogeneous groupings and a separate “Watered down’ special ed curriculum  because during the past year they were inappropriately switched from being called “Developmental Delay” to having “Mental Retardation. We want that ‘soft’ label Developmental Delay to remain as a NAME option at eligibility. It won’t cost you a dime.