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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is the Sunday Story from Up First. Across the U.S., there are more than 300,000 students categorized as emotionally disturbed students. Emotional disturbance is a federally recognized special education category. It's for kids who struggle not with learning or mobility, but with their behavior and emotions.
Chapter 2: What is emotional disturbance in the context of special education?
Like all kids with disabilities, students with the emotional disturbance label are guaranteed a free and appropriate public education. It's baked into a law passed more than 50 years ago, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. These kids are also legally entitled to services and specialized help.
But there's a big question around whether the support they're getting is doing more harm than good. This week on The Sunday Story, a look at one student who was categorized as emotionally disturbed when he was just a young child and what that has meant for the rest of his education.
At home, I knew how to act. But at school, it was problems. I was a bad kid.
Stay with us.
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I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday Story. I'm joined by reporter Lori Stern. She spent years covering education and joins us now to talk about her long-term reporting on the disability category called emotional disturbance. Lori, welcome to the podcast. Aisha, it's great to be here.
So I know you have like a specific story to tell, but before we dive into it, can you just help us understand what emotional disturbance is? At least to me, this isn't something I'm familiar with.
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.
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Chapter 3: How does the emotional disturbance label affect students' education?
Okay, Aisha. It's tucked away on the corner of the fourth floor, and I went to his class for the first time back in May of 2024.
Hey, guys, let's get that rocking here. Lecture's the word. I'm going to get flying on it here.
There were about a dozen kids in the class, and every one of them had an EBD label. Mr. K was the case manager for many of them, and also their English and social studies teacher. The day I visited, he started class with a vocabulary lesson.
All right, dudes, so the word is lecture. I'm going to put it up here right now. Make sure that you get it.
Mr. K talks fast, so in case you missed it, the word class started with on this day was lecture.
Did anyone look up lect just so I know? Did anyone look that up? No, we thought we'd wait for you, K. All right.
Okay, so he's giving a lecture on lecture.
Yeah, he had the word up on a PowerPoint slide.
Lecture, anything like that. That is to read, choose, or to gather. You good? And then the U-R-E is act, process, or being, right? Pleasure, rapture. Mr. K asked me to jump in. Help me out, Lori. Other things that end with U-R-E. Conjecture. Feature. Feature, excellent. What's that? Sure, sure. Okay, well, I mean, it sounds like it's a fun class.
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Chapter 4: What kind of support do students with emotional disturbances receive?
You know, I've had, like, my friend's child got injured when a child pushed her. She had to get stitches. So, I mean, there's a lot of complications with having kids in a class where who are kind of having this explosive behavior. But I think also for the mother of the child who's trying to, whose child gets that label, how challenging that must be for her as well.
What was Crystal's reaction and what does she think about him going to a separate school?
Yeah, you're right. It's really complicated. She didn't like the padded timeout rooms and the heavy-handed way the school enforced discipline, but she also felt it was a bit of a safety net. And you know how you were talking about your daughter's classmate needing some help? Well, Walter did too, and he actually got some help outside of school.
We did family therapy. They did individual therapy with him. He got a mentor, which took him places where she still is his mentor to this day.
It sounds like Walt was getting the help that he needed, the close supervision, therapy, a mentor. Did it help?
You know, this is where we get back to how hard it is to measure EBD. and progress for students with that label. Other special ed designations have measurable goals, but EBD doesn't have goals that are straightforward to measure. Like, how would you measure personal relationships or inappropriate feelings?
The bottom line is Walt spent all of elementary school in this segregated school with no interaction at all with students in regular classrooms.
So what happened after elementary school?
Well, by seventh grade, the school team that worked with Walt decided he was ready for a less restrictive environment, a regular middle school. No more locked rooms and holds. The plan was, at his new middle school, he would be eased into regular classrooms. But still, he'd start out in a classroom with other kids in EBD, and that's where his home base would be.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Walt face in his educational journey?
Like being put in those classes is what also helped like kind of reshape that thought process.
Williams is 27 now. He's got a steady job and he lives in a renovated mid-century apartment in downtown St. Paul. And that's where we met. What would have become of you if you hadn't had those opportunities of going into more challenging classes?
I would say one very important thing would be a little bit lower than what it is now. And that very important thing is confidence.
Williams graduated from Central after four years. He said mainstreaming helped him meet kids from different backgrounds. He got involved in extracurriculars, and he even took an advanced placement class.
I feel like high school is kind of like a smaller version of the real world, really. Yeah, it's just in one building, though. It's a critical age range, the high school age range. Is that age where you want to like push kids into newer and more challenging things?
Well, it sounds like mainstreaming, like being in the classes with other kids who weren't EBD, like that that made all the difference for him. Why wasn't that something that could have happened for Walt?
That's actually a pretty long story. But the bottom line is teachers told me they felt blindsided at the time by all the changes the school district made at once. They said they didn't have enough training or support or time to prepare. And as a result, schools did get more chaotic and violent.
And then in 2016, the superintendent and a lot of the school board were replaced and mainstreaming was scrapped. The school district returned to the old way of doing things, what we have now, separate EBD classrooms.
And that's what Walt got, those separate classrooms.
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