By Stephanie Coombs and Kelly Leydier
Cutbacks to the district school board’s special education program are inevitable, say school officials, despite attempts to save them.
The Ottawa-Carleton District School board has already approved in principle an $8.2-million cut to special needs programs for the upcoming budget. The province has given the board four years to cut $20 million.
Most likely, the cuts will mean less one-on-one attention to students and the integration of special needs students who have until now been in separate classrooms.
But exactly which programs or staff will be cut is still up in the air.
“We don’t know which classes will go, but we know there is a definite possibility some of them will disappear around the region,” says Terry Davies, principal of Elgin Street Public School.
Of the 79,000 students in the Ottawa-Carleton board, about 12 per cent have some disability, from minor learning problems to physical and mental disabilities.
Elgin Street, like Cambridge Public School and McNabb Park School, has classes for students with language and learning disabilities. Each school has about 20 students in its special education classes.
But, at Centretown’s fourth elementary school, Centennial, about 100 of the schools 210 students require some sort of special education.
In addition to classes for students with language and learning disabilities, Centennial has the only total communication program for elementary students with hearing disabilities in the region, as well as the only orthopedic classroom, for students with physical disabilities.
That makes the possibility of cutbacks an important issue for parents.
“We’ve been trying to explain to the trustees how important Centennial is to these students,” says Pat Erb, whose 11-year-old daughter has cerebral palsy and is a student in the orthopedic classroom. “But it looks like the programs will be cut back anyway.”
Although the programs themselves won’t be cut, staff probably will be, says Barbara Stollery, the board’s superintendent of special education.
“There is a proposed reduction in the number of teachers in the communication classroom,” she says. Right now, there are seven students and three teachers in the class, who communicate solely through sign language.
Stollery says the proposal would reduce the class to one teacher.
The orthopedic classroom would see a cutback, not in teachers, but in therapists who assist the students.
“It means that the physical therapist and the occupational therapist will both be cut to two-and-a-half days instead of five days a week,” says Erb.
“But even still, they’ll be only coming in on a consultative basis. They’ll walk in, say: ‘This is what you have to do,’ and then leave it up to the teachers or us parents to make sure it gets done.”
Stollery maintains the school board isn’t required to provide those services. “We have been providing them for a long time, but we have to re-examine how it is being done.”
Trustees have until March 22 to make a final decision.