The effects of the pandemic show themselves in every survey of post-pandemic behavior, among students and adults. The pandemic isn’t over but the isolation and anxiety it produced had long-lasting effects.
Dorothy Siegel, Elise Cappella and Kristie Patten describe what they call “a better way” to help students with disabilities.
On December 1, 2022, New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks announced a path forward for transforming and rebuilding trust in the city’s programs serving students with disabilities. This plan includes the sustaining and scaling of four successful and innovative programs serving students with disabilities across the city, the creation of a new paid internship program for high school students in Occupational, Physical and Speech Therapy for students with IEPs, as well as the empowerment of families and community through a new advisory council that will make bold recommendations on reimagining special education in the New York City Public Schools.
This announcement demonstrates the city’s commitment to address the systemic and historic marginalization of students with IEPs, a marginalization that has disproportionately impacted the city’s Black and Brown students with IEPs.
A recent Chalkbeat article, “Public schools are NYC’s main youth mental health system. Where kids land often depends on what their parents can pay,” exposed to public view the growing number of New York City students with serious mental healthissues and behavioral problems that get in the way of their education. Because New York State has inadequately funded mental health services, the onus falls on local school districts, which don’t have the option to turn students away. “The entire state of New York has shifted the burden of mental health to the school districts,” said a social worker quoted in the article.
Under federal law, school districts must provide all students with disabilities, including those with mental health and behavioral problems, a “free and appropriate public education.” And many such students in New York City do receive a high-quality education with therapeutic supports in the public schools.
But serious inequities abound. As Chalkbeat noted, in the New York City public schools,
“Black boys get classified with emotional disabilities at a far higher rate than other kids. In the 2020-2021 school year . . . Black students made up less than a quarter of students overall, yet they accounted for nearly half of students classified as having an emotional disability. White students, who made up 15% of all students in New York City public schools, accounted for just 8% of emotional disability classifications.”
As we can see, Black students, especially boys, are overwhelmingly overrepresented in the emotional disability classification. This matters because students with this classification have much worse outcomes than other students. As per Chalkbeat, in 2020-21 only 12% of students classified with an emotional disability received a Regents diploma in four years, compared to 73% of all New York City students.
For decades, New York City students who are classified with an emotional disability have found themselves on a path to highly segregated classrooms and schools, and, ultimately, limited life options. Neighborhood schools are not able to meet the needs of such challenging students, especially in inclusive settings. A recent report by NYU Research Alliance for NYC Schoolsstated that in 2016-17 only 33% of students with an emotional disability were served in an inclusive setting, compared to 66% of students with all disabilities. These young people often drop out and may fall into the juvenile justice system.
In the past few years, an increasing number of students with mental health and behavioral problems, no doubt exacerbated by two years of Covid, are showing up at the schoolhouse door. Of these, some find their way to private schools whose tuitions arepaid by the public school system – close to $1 billion in the last school year alone for students with autism, learning disabilities or mental health/behavioral issues.
Predictably, the overwhelming majority of these private school students are White and hail from more advantaged backgrounds. According to the Chalkbeat analysis, most students who are able to attend private schools on the public dime “live in just four of the richest and whitest districts,” including the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side of Manhattan and Park Slope in Brooklyn. As noted above, racially disparate classification is onemajor inequity in the system. But another is family wealth.
Clearly, New York State can and must do more, especially the restoration and rebuilding of mental health services for children and adolescents with mental health and behavioral issues.
But there is much that the New York City public school system can do as well, in particular at the beginning of a child’s educational journey. Students at risk of being classified with an emotional disability can and should be diverted from that drop-out/juvenile justice path onto a much better life path, as early as possible.
There IS a better way: The Path Program.
The New York City Department of Education (DOE), in close collaboration with researchers at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development (NYU), have developed a better way to educate these students: the Path program, which is based on the highly successful ASD Nest Program for autistic students. Path, like Nest, is a comprehensive, cohesive, collaborative, fully inclusive program that serves students at risk of an emotional disability (ED) classification. Path redirects these students onto a more hopeful path.
ASD Nest Program
The ASD Nest Program has developed over the past twenty years as a collaboration between the DoE and NYU. Launched in 2003, the DoE’s ASD Nest Program works with autisticstudents who are capable of doing grade-level academic work. The goal is to help these students develop competence in their academic, social and behavioral functioning, in order to realize their full, unique potential as independent and fulfilled adults.
In the 2022-23 school year, 69 New York City public schools are educating approximately 1,700 ASD students in 350+ integrated co-taught K-12 classrooms. The vast majority of Nest students stay in the program through twelfth grade, where 95% of Nest high schoolers graduate with a Regents diploma.
Path Program:
The Path program promotes the inclusion of students with emotional disabilities within community schools and strives to disrupt the historical segregation of Black and brown children in restrictive special education settings. The program employs many of the same evidence-based principles, practices, and structures developed for the Nest program, with the addition ofevidence-based trauma-informed and social-emotional learning strategies known to work well for students with this classification. Path classes are small co-taught integrated classes, with no more than four students classified with ED in each class, alongside twelve to twenty typically developing peers. Teachers provide the general education curriculum, using specialized supports and a variety of co-teaching models. With related services integrated into the day, Path classrooms incorporate supports typically provided by outside therapists to foster a safe environment in which Path students can comfortably interact with peers. Whole-class social, sensory, behavioral and academic strategies form a foundational level of support, consistent across all settings.
All school staff – teachers, therapists and administrators — receive high-quality pre- and in-service training and on-site support. Path staff meet weekly as a team to create comprehensive support plans for each student, which involve classroom and individual supports and family partnership.
The DoE piloted the model in one District 9 school in 2021-22 with a grant through the Fund for Public Schools. In 2022-23, the DoE opened four Path classrooms in three District 9 neighborhood schools: three kindergartens and one first grade class. Three more kindergarten classes will open this year in three other districts in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn, with the goal to eventually have Path programs in most NYC neighborhoods.
Path and Nest are two examples of the DoE’s “specialized programs,” differentiated program models for different disability categories. So far, the DoE has created specialized programs for students with autism (Nest and Horizon), emotional disabilities (Path), and intellectual disabilities (ACES). Importantly, all specialized programs – and their students — are fully integrated into their neighborhood school communities.
Over time, the ASD Nest Program has proven to be the program of choice for many, if not most, parents of autistic students, even those with the means to go to private school. The main admission requirement for Nest is an autism classification.
Similarly, Path is intended to level the playing field for Black and Brown students at risk of an emotional disability who don’t come from advantaged backgrounds. It is commendable that the DOE has chosen to invest in this research-based model – in some of the poorest community school districts in the city – to create inclusive pathways to school and life success.
With the chancellor’s commitment to the expansion of the ASD Nest and Path programs, the future looks much brighter for New York City’s students with significant disabilities.
Dorothy Siegel, Co-founder, ASD Nest Program
Elise Cappella, Professor of Applied Psychology, PI of NYU Path Program, NYU Steinhardt School
Kristie Patten, Professor, Department of Occupational Therapy,PI of NYU ASD Nest Support Project, Co-Investigator of NYU Path Program, NYU Steinhardt School
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My small suburban NYC school district has had an inclusion special education program with co-teachers for at least twenty years in each of the district’s elementary schools. One class per grade level in each school is smaller. It includes two teachers, one of whom is special ed. certified, and one teaching assistant. The program works well as long as the two teachers are flexible and know how to collaborate together. The model gets trickier to replicate as students move into secondary education with increased academic demands.
High school students that work with students must work under the direction of trained, certified professional teachers. It must not be assumed they can interact with students independently. As an ESL teacher, I’ve had volunteers and education majors that wanted to learn about teaching ESL in my class observing and assisting students. It only works when there is a professional that plans for and monitors the activity.
BTW the inclusion classes contain blended regular ed. and special education students together. A few regular education parents, some of whom had concerns in the beginning, quickly found that having two teachers in the class was beneficial to their children as well. Over, the years very few parents or students objected to the program.
NOT standardized or segregationist? Lo and behold!
While Commissioner Mike Morath and the Texas Education Agency allow Texas ISDs to skim millions out of sped funds— leaving a ratio of 1 certified high school sped teacher to 50 sped kids.—Described in my book What Would LBJ Say?
I applaud the implementation of these two programs and am hopeful that they’ll continue to be funded. I’d also note that, as valuable as they are, they are not necessarily new to the system.
My daughter attended a NYC K-5 school, starting in 2001, which had a program very similar to The Path. It was a model school for Inclusion. My District 75 school (a citywide district that served kids with severe disabilities) sent us there a few times to observe classes.
I remember my colleagues and I coming away as very impressed with the teachers and their methods…but with one caveat: the kids with emotional difficulties were nowhere near as hard to handle as those in our self contained classrooms.
I can attest to the points raised in this posted essay. There’s a history to what actually got us to this point of what’s being called a “broken system”. And the devil is in the details.
Take the busing issue. There’s been a concerted effort to move D75 kids into their home districts for about a decade; now. A major roadblock began during the twelve years of Mike Bloomberg’s “no excuses/test and punish” tenure and remains, today. If a school had bad consecutive report card grades (according to the high stakes test scores), they risked being closed down and replaced by a charter school. Having the highly disruptive kids in a class of 25 to 30 made it very difficult to raise those test scores. And the schools’ report card grade included episodes of violence, as well. Both in the school and on the bus. This really put the schools in a tough spot. And many did, indeed, end up being shut down.
Then the administration added new barriers to referring students to our D75 special ed program, citing the stigma factor. The general ed schools tried setting up separate classes for the disruptive kids…and were told to stop for the same reason: stigma.
There are competing interests at play when it comes to inclusion, outside of those in the admin/teacher world. The voices of the special needs parents/advocates often compete with those of the general ed parents who want their children to receive the best education possible. Adding the trained professionals to the mix, working with the special needs kids is an important and intelligent step…but it’s a reality that some children are easier managed than others.
There’s no easy solution.There are so many different reasons that disruptive kids act up. The effects of poverty (gang violence, malnutrition, drug addiction, fetal alcohol syndrome, and more) is often a major factor. Those issues are beyond the scope of the schools and not about to be remedied any time soon.
Too many inclusion classes including NEST programs that include high-functioning autistic students have grown in size in NYC over the years, undermining much of their value and benefits to students. Some are as large as 30 students per class. That is why many parents try to get their kids out of these classes and enroll them in private schools, even those are not inclusive settings, because the class sizes are much smaller.
Leonie, please don’t do this. You’ve stretched one anecdote (exactly ONE middle school was forced to raise the class size in ONE of its grades because they received too many children in that grade) into a systemic problem of Nest getting too large class sizes “over the years, undermining much of their value and benefits to students. Some are as large as 30 students per class.” To put it simply, NOT TRUE!
NO, Leonie, exactly TWO Nest classes in ONE school have 30 students. This is NOT a systemic problem as you imply. You also state that “Many parents try to get their kids out of these classes and enroll them in private schools.” This is yet another anecdote that became a fact in your mind. Very FEW students ever leave the Nest program — probably fewer than the number of students that leave ANY DoE program or school in any given year. In ninth grade, some students opt to go to non-Nest high schools like Stuyvesant, Townsend Harris, Bard, catholic high schools, etc., but very few leave in other grades. Indeed, 1700 Nest parents are overwhelmingly satisfied with their child’s progress in the Nest program, which boasts a 95% high school graduation rate. What IS true is that Nest is not the ideal setting for SOME kids. Nor does it claim to be. In those cases, parents don’t have to “try to get their kids out of [Nest} classes.” They simply move them elsewhere, like every other student in a DoE school. My own autistic son could not have handled a Nest classroom, but he did thrive in a small self-contained setting.
You are doing a disservice to parents who have justifiably pinned their hopes on the Nest program to help their child succeed in school — and life. Please turn your brilliant muckraking skills to a more worthy target.