In the words of the song writer, little things mean a lot.

And when President Bush signed reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act this month, it was a little thing that made hearts sing at the Spokane Guilds’ School.

The IDEA is the law that governs how federal funds are spent by institutions — including not only public schools but also facilities such as the Guilds’ School — are to be spent. The Spokane school is a nonprofit agency that has been providing services to developmentally impaired children in this area for nearly half a century.

The school is one of Spokane’s success stories, but beginning in the Clinton administration, officials in the U.S. Education Department have threatened to undermine its effectiveness. The reauthorization legislation provided a chance to make an important correction.

Debate over the measure focused mostly on whether the government would untie the disciplinary hands of schools in dealing with special education students who caused disruptions in the classroom. Important though it was, that wasn’t the provision that mattered most at the Guilds’ School.

The concern in Spokane was over a requirement that children receive services in their homes or schools. In a misguided belief that providing such services in a center such as that run by the Guilds’ School on West Garland was somehow discriminatory, the regulators insisted that children be served in their “natural environments.”

In fact, the Spokane Guilds’ School will do just that for families who prefer it. But many families prefer to come to the well-equipped and ably staffed center. School officials knew that to follow the federal guideline would mean requiring therapists to spend much of their time packing equipment in and out of vehicles and traveling around the region from one appointment to another.

The result? Much less efficiency and fewer children’s needs met. Not surprisingly, constituents of the school waged a heavy letter-writing campaign to urge the Department of Education to change its requirements. Ultimately, it took legislative intervention by Congressman George Nethercutt. Ironically, it was Sen. Patty Murray — whom Nethercutt was challenging in this year’s election — who helped keep the essence of Nethercutt’s work intact when she was a member of the conference committee on the bill.

Now the law gives the school and the parents power to make a decision that’s appropriate for the individual child. That’s a harmonious outcome for which distant bureaucrats have no ear.