Prior to the mid-1970s, over one million children with disabilities were excluded from the nation's schools. In 1975, as a result of intense litigation and advocacy, Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA, P.L. 94-142), now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), mandating that public schools…

Forest Grove School District v. T.A. involved a student with learning disabilities, Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and depression (T.A.) whose parents had moved him to a private academy for students with special needs without first consulting with his public school. In the past, the school district had found T.A. to be ineligible…

Case law has generally established that school districts cannot summarily exclude children with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) from the classroom. Issues abound as to the proper manner to make the classroom attendance of the HIV-infected child easier for everyone. Still debated is the scope of AIDS…

By reducing class size we will close the achievement gap in public school education, caused by prior neglect especially since the civil rights era of the sixties. Additional, highly qualified and specialized teachers will more effectively manage a smaller class size and serve more individual student needs in the crucial early grades, where a solid…

Analyzes the history, values, and legal issues involved in the inclusion controversy. Opponents of full inclusion of all students with disabilities in the classroom contend that it is a simplistic answer to complex problems. The Community Engagement Dialogic Model is an approach for dealing with judicial intervention in many special-education…

The Council of the Great City Schools prepared this report to summarize findings and recommendations that the organization's Strategic Support Teams made during visits to the Richmond Public Schools in the Fall 2003. These teams were requested by the Richmond schools' superintendent and funded by the U.S. Department of Education to review school…