Lori Stern

Yeah, and that's probably because emotional disturbance is a catch-all category.

According to the law that created special ed, the criteria include, and this is some of the law's language,

a pervasive mood of unhappiness, an inability to maintain healthy relationships, and inappropriate behavior and feelings under normal circumstances.

The experts I talked to all said emotional disturbance is subjective.

It's not a medical diagnosis.

It's a label that's specifically created for special education.

And in most cases, it's up to schools to decide who gets that label.

It depends on a lot of things, including the state where the student lives and what school they go to and how many resources that school has for special education.

But the goal in special education is always for kids to learn in, quote, the least restrictive environment.

But more often than not, kids with emotional disturbance don't learn in regular classrooms.

They learn in separate classrooms.

Federal data show students with that emotional disturbance label are three times more likely to be educated outside of regular classrooms than the overall population of kids with disabilities.

And even the EBD kids who go to regular schools are often placed in their own separate classrooms.

To give you a sense of what that's like, I want to tell you about a classroom I spend time in.

It was at a high school about a mile from where I live in St.

Paul, Minnesota.

It's called Central Senior High School.

It's this concrete building, pretty institutional looking, but it has a great reputation.

It's known for accomplished alumni, lots of extracurriculars, and it's also super diverse.

Minnesota employs more special ed staff than most other states, so Central has quite a few special ed teachers, including two who run classrooms specifically for kids with emotional disturbance.