If A School Is Not Broken, Don’T Fix It

Miracles happen every day in a former elementary school on West Garland, home to the Spokane Guilds’ School and Neuromuscular Center. Annually, about 200 children with cerebral palsy, Down Syndrome and other developmental problems are taught during the crucial first three years of life how to reach their full potential. The school’s efforts are so successful that about 15 percent of its graduates require no further special education.

About two out of every 100 children in Spokane County are born with developmental problems. For 40 years the Guilds’ School has been achieving astounding results for such children, regardless of their financial situation.

Now the U.S. Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Service is proposing changes in federal guidelines that would severely impair the Guilds’ School’s ability to excel. The proposal seeks non-segregation of developmentally delayed babies and toddlers by requiring that they receive treatment only in “natural and typical environments” - at home or daycare rather than at qualified centers such as the Guilds’ School. Exceptions to this misguided rule would have to be justified via new hoops of red tape, thus taking time away from work of real value.

Policy changes might be reasonable if the Guilds’ School were a gloomy institutional warehouse, but this is not the case. The school is a cheerful, inviting place that resembles any other preschool. The children look happy to be there, their parents relaxed. For so many families the few hours spent each week at the Guilds’ School are more than developmental therapy; they’re a much-needed respite. They’re bright spots in the days of a possibly isolated child.

The proposal’s implication that every home and every day care is a good setting for conducting therapy is ridiculously optimistic.

The Guilds’ School is staffed by teams of dedicated, competent therapists and teachers. The needs of each child are evaluated and a therapy program is tailored especially for that child and his or her family. The staff is not opposed to meeting these needs in a natural or typical environment when necessary.

In fact, about 30 percent of their clients are already served at home, such as when a child is deemed medically fragile.

To mandate that the facility take its show on the road is just as absurd as it would be to require private physicians to make only house calls.

It would be logistically impossible to transport the school’s vast array of therapy and learning tools to each client. The drain on staff hours would be enormous. Without substantial cost increases, the quality and quantity of service would be severely compromised. Where’s the advantage?

The Guilds’ School’s system works.

There is nothing to fix. The federal bureaucrats should leave this fine school alone so it can keep doing what it does best - make miracles happen.