The percentage of students who qualify for special education services in Flint has grown from 13.1 percent in the school year before the water became contaminated to 20.5 percent last school year.ĭixon has moved to neighboring school districts more than once, only to return because she was unable to make ends meet. Many of those jobs are gone, poverty is pervasive, and few cities report more violence per capita. The water crisis has further eroded trust in a city and school system already decimated by deindustrialization and urban decay.įlint was a city once fueled by General Motors jobs. “You’re supposed to be able to trust your child’s school, and I don’t.” “I should be able to walk into my child’s school and know and trust that everybody that has interaction with him is doing the best things for him,” Onstott said. But, in a prepared statement from the district’s public relations firm, he responds by saying: “The Flint Community schools district is deeply committed to the well-being and success of all students.”įor Onstott, though, trying to secure educational support for her son has been one big waiting game: waiting months for an updated individualized education program or IEP, waiting weeks for special education staff to return her calls, waiting hours in district offices to plead her case for help. Lopez did not respond to interview requests from Education Week. That’s more than double the national average of 13 percent. In an interview with television station WJRT, Flint schools Superintendent Derrick Lopez said that 28 percent of the district’s students have individualized education programs this school year. Even so, the percentage of special education students in Flint could continue to rise as children born during the water crisis begin to enroll in the city’s schools. “The combination of lead in paint and lead in water is a double whammy,” Landrigan said.Ĭity officials say the water is safe to drink now, but the water fountains and faucets in the schools remain off-limits for students. Still more children have suffered lead exposure because of lead-based paint in the city’s older, deteriorated housing stock, said Landrigan, a professor of biology and the director of the Global Public Health Program and the Global Observatory on Pollution and Health at the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society at Boston College. The contamination occurred when the city switched its water supply from Lake Huron as a cost-cutting measure. In Flint, families drank, bathed, and cooked in their homes with lead-laced water from the Flint River for 17 months before the problem was discovered and the water supply was shut off. “Any amount of lead is damaging to a child’s brain development, and clearly a number of children in Flint were overexposed,” said epidemiologist and pediatrician Philip Landrigan, whose research in the 1970s in El Paso, Texas, was among the first to show that lead can cause brain damage to children at levels too low to cause clinically evident signs and symptoms. While the lawsuit does not pin the increased need for special education services solely on the prolonged lead exposure, research has linked lead toxicity to learning disabilities, poor classroom performance, and increased aggression.
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