ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 11, 1997 TAG: 9702110065
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: FALLS CHURCH
SOURCE: ROBERT O'HARROW Jr. THE WASHINGTON POST
RAPID IMPROVEMENTS are changing the landscape of special education, enabling thousands to achieve academic success.
With a little help from her teacher at Falls Church High School, Rachel Shilling adjusted the microphone on her headset, leaned toward a laptop computer and spoke to it in a cheery voice.
``Wake up,'' the 16-year-old told the machine. ``Begin dictate mode.''
The 10th-grader spent the next hour working on a paper about South American history, operating the computer through voice commands because she has almost no use of her hands.
Her spoken words about Incan civilization appeared as neat sentences on the screen. When she made a mistake, she simply told the machine to go back a step or two.
Rachel, whose hands are soft and bent because of a congenital defect, recently started using the special software known as Dragon Dictate. Before that, writing meant struggling to hold a pen in her limp fingers. Now she can write papers and do other schoolwork much more easily, and she is thinking more seriously about going to college.
``This is a great thing,'' said Rachel, the first Fairfax County student to use Dragon Dictate in school. ``It makes me more independent. Now I can be like other students.''
Rapid improvements in technology are changing the landscape of special education, enabling thousands of disabled students to surmount once-formidable obstacles to academic success.
In schools across the Washington area and elsewhere, there are devices that provide electronic voices for children who can't speak. Computers offer Internet access for those who can't type. Software guides students with severe learning problems through research projects. Machines produce sounds to help blind students interpret curves on graphing calculators.
Much of the technology, such as machines that respond to voice commands, has been around in some form for years. But recent improvements in computer speed and memory, coupled with the software industry's sharper focus on the needs of disabled students, have made such equipment more effective and available than ever before.
``The technology is allowing kids with disabilities to become real participants in the classrooms, the schools and communities,'' said Fred Orelove, executive director of the Virginia Institute for Developmental Disabilities at Virginia Commonwealth University, which conducts research on special education. ``They can really be taught, in the best sense of the word.''
But even as the potential benefits from technology grow, Orelove and other specialists warn that problems loom.
Much of the equipment is expensive, and school officials are struggling to curb special education budgets that have soared in the last decade for various reasons.
Fairfax officials estimate they will end up spending at least $10,000 on Rachel's machine, the software inside it and the months of training she needs to use it. The county's overall budget for special education technology and training has increased about 60 percent in the last five years, from $253,000 to $407,000.
In several cases, parents already have clashed with school officials over what technology their disabled children are entitled to and how much the students would benefit from the equipment.
There's no doubt that the number of children using such equipment has increased sharply in recent years. In Fairfax, 904 students now receive special technology training and equipment, three times as many as did five years ago.
For several years, Trinh La, an 18-year-old Fairfax student who is blind, has had a machine that reads aloud every word she writes so she can keep track of her typing mistakes and prints out her notes in braille. This year, she got a new feature that provides audible clues about whether the curves she calculates in math class are going up or down.
Trinh, a senior at Robinson Secondary School, said all this helps her keep pace with her classmates - and fit in better.
``With the new technology, I'm able to turn my papers in on time,'' Trinh said. ``In the past, I would tell the teachers, `Could you wait for another day?'... It was embarrassing,'' Trinh said.
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