BY ANTON MILLER - In the scramble to stake out positions for the coming debate on whether there should be separate schools for students with special needs, ideology threatens to obscure two important practical considerations. There are different kinds of students with special needs, and different kinds of special needs that students have.

“ Special needs” is a broad term that includes students with severe developmental challenges involving intellectual ability, mobility and self- help skills, as well as those with milder functional limitations. In the latter group are children with borderline intellectual ability, mild intellectual disability, learning disabilities ( particularly languagebased learning disabilities), and subtle forms of autism.

As a pediatric specialist who is involved in assessing and supporting children with developmental disabilities and special needs on a daily basis, I am often reminded that an educational environment that works for children with certain kinds of challenges may not work for others who face different challenges.

The historical move to mainstreaming and integration of students with special needs aimed to ensure that children with quite severe disabilities were not “ warehoused’ in segregated settings with few expectations to learn, and without the stimulation of activities done alongside their peers.

This principle is still entirely valid and also serves to ensure that these children are not the objects of discrimination.

A very different issue arises for children with the milder range of disabilities described above. These children seem in many ways to be just like their peers, but they find they are set apart not only by special learning needs, but also by special social needs.

They are usually unable to learn and manage academic learning at the same rate, and in the same way as their peers.

Furthermore, they often are not able to engage fully with the social milieu of grade school, because their interests and ways of communicating reflect developmental delays and perhaps specific difficulties in speech, language, and social communication.

Many of these children are aware of the differences between themselves and their classmates, and so, besides becoming socially isolated, they begin to feel defeated, depressed and sometimes hopeless.

A number of parents and professionals involved in the care and education of children with special needs are now wondering out loud, somewhat paradoxically, whether full mainstreaming is in fact the best approach for this group of children.

A number of things are clear, however. Many children in British Columbia schools are affected by what the ministry of education terms “ low severity- high incidence” conditions, and many of these are struggling academically, socially and emotionally under present policies of full integration. It is likely that many parents would be potentially interested to explore alternatives.

Finally, the situation illustrates that we need to have flexibility in policies, recognizing that that there are different kinds of special needs students with different kinds of special needs. Policies that rigidly maintain ideological values may be harmful.

We should be able to offer mainstreaming and segregation options, and placement decisions should be based both on family values and preferences informed by research evidence of likely harms and benefits.

Dr. Anton Miller lives in Vancouver.