Special Needs in America Today

In today’s society, there has been a lot of discussion about the mentally handicapped and the way they are taught in schools. In many public schools around the nation children characterized as special needs have a specific class and specifically trained teachers to help them with the challenge that is educating special needs children. The children that a. re characterized by the term special needs need to be in an environment where they have the modifications and the trained teachers to help them get as good as an education as they can physically receive. This process of getting a special needs student can be halted by the lack of concern that this issue has, and they lack of teachers that are willing to work with special needs students.

To talk about this matter specifically we need to define what it means to be a special needs students; the educational requirements of pupils or students suffering from any of a wide range of physical disabilities, medical conditions, intellectual difficulties, or emotional problems, including deafness, blindness, dyslexia, learning difficulties, and behavioral problems. By this definition more people than we think can be characterized as a 405 student, or to actually placed into a slower paced special needs classroom. When parents in the 21^st century find out that their child will be characterized as a special needs recipient the comes with a negative connotation that they will be taking care of this child for the rest of lives, and they will be so different than the rest of children their age. Yes, children placed in the category of special needs will be different but they are not helpless, and they are not stupid. These children are different and they might have different variations of needs than other children, but they are not alone. There are approximately 400,000 people living in the world with Down Syndrome (recorded in 2012). One or Two in every 1,000 children is born with some sort of FAS, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Many of these children are treated like what has happened to them is their own fault and that in some way, shape, or form that they deserve this. With all of this being said, the Federal Government decided that these children need to be integrated back into the normal classroom where they don’t have any of the modifications that they would have if they were in a specific special needs classroom. But in today’s schools, there are not a lot if any special education classrooms, there are just FLS (Function Life Skills). Theses FLS classes do not to teach any of the normal teaks that other classrooms go over; this class teaches the special needs students how to have a self-efficient life for life in a group home.

I firmly believe that children who have special needs need to be held to a different accountability and need to be helped differently than people who are all physically and mentally there. If the child could not keep with the pace of being in a classroom, but does not qualify for the FLS class, there is not a whole lot in place right now to give these children the support and the help that they deserve. There needs to be some help with children who are under this broad spectrum of the term “Special Needs Student”. These children are just that children, they want to be treated and given the same chances at succeeding like everyone else, but to succeed sometimes these children need to be taken out of this competitive environment so they can have a chance to succeed in their own confortable environment.