Fulton County education leaders are restructuring the district’s special-needs programs so students won’t have to be bused long distances to schools out of their neighborhoods.
Starting in 2013, Fulton’s Services for Exceptional Children department began to re-evaluate the location of special-needs programs across the district to ensure students were served in their home attendance zone.
Students with disabilities and their parents often feel disconnected to their communities when they have to travel great distances to school. In Fulton and other parts of metro Atlanta, some students with disabilities face riding a bus more than an hour to attend specialized programs at schools.
Fulton leaders released a report at a school board meeting Nov. 10 announcing the changes, which they began rolling out this fall. In the first phase, 50 students now attend high schools in their neighborhoods instead of being bused far away. Those schools are Cambridge, Chattahoochee, Tri-Cities and Langston Hughes high schools.
Next school year, four additional high schools will receive programs allowing special-needs students in those attendance zones to avoid long bus rides. The remaining three high schools will receive programs during the 2017-2018 school year, Fulton officials say. The approximate cost to date for adding the programs is nearly $1.2 million.
The district is looking to add more special-needs programs to elementary and middle schools as well.
“This absolutely is the right thing for kids, and that’s why we’re putting the resources behind it to make it happen,” said Cristy Smith, Fulton’s executive director of services for exceptional children.
In Fulton, about 9,800 students with disabilities and close to 350 – some of the most severely disabled students — are expected to be affected by the district’s plan to add more special-needs programs.
In Georgia, close to 185,000 children with disabilities, ages 3 to 21, attend public schools, according to the Georgia Department of Education. Neither the state nor the U.S. DOE collects information about students with disabilities who ride buses or the length of their rides.
Special-needs advocates estimate hundreds of Georgia’s most severely disabled students throughout the state are bused out of their communities. In extreme cases, some students are on the bus up to two hours each way to school. Kids in rural areas, where resources and programs are more limited, can face particularly long bus rides.
The long bus rides can hurt academic performance and leave children disconnected from friends and neighbors, parents and advocates say. They also say some students are unable to gain valuable learning experiences from non-disabled peers because they are segregated and receive little exposure to students who don’t have disabilities.
About the Author
