As I said in part one of this article, the 1980s started in Ontario with the passing of new legislation regarding Special Education.  Bill 82 required schools to provide special education programs and special education services for their exceptional pupils, or agree with another board to provide them.  The concept of “exceptional pupils” was introduced, along with a number of categories of exceptionality.  This led to the requirement for each exceptional child to have an Individual Education Plan (IEP) that contained, “...  specific objectives and an outline of the educational services that meets the needs of the exceptional pupil.” (An exceptional student was defined as having, significant needs in the areas of behaviour, communication, intellectual, physical or multiple disabilities and meets the provincial and school board criteria for identification.)

The school established Identification Placement and Review Committees comprised of special-ed staff, the principal, classroom teachers and parents, as well as relevant specialist consultants, that met on a regular basis to review assessments and design appropriate interventions.  In addition to deciding if a particular pupil needed assistance from the Special Education Department, the IPRC would also make recommendations for other kinds of support particularly for children with severe physical or intellectual disabilities.  By 1991 the IPRC had become DART or Diagnostic Assessment and Remediation Team.  Resource teacher were beginning to spend a significant amount of time testing, meeting and filling in forms.

During this period the number of educational assistants working under the supervision of the special-ed department grew substantially.  Over time the teaching staff grew from two to three and at one point three and a half.  In addition to the large Resource Room in the 1971 extension, special-ed (or as it was now know the Resource Department) had a second classroom on the ground floor to be closer to the primary classrooms it served.  From a staff point of view the department began with Marj Poling and David Boardman in 1971.  After Marj left Ellen Tait joined and later Debora Merchant.  When Ellen moved to a classroom assignment Bill Ouderkirk replaced her.  Debbie Merchant had also worked in the Low Enrollment classes as had Jacquie Tarnowski and Haroldine Ainslie. 

The requirement for detailed assessments of pupil needs, that would support appropriate program design, led the board to contract testing and consultative services in a variety of ways.  James Bryson fulfilled that role for a while.  After he left, and during the tenure of Robert Esch as Director, a consultancy firm from Southern Ontario provided a team approach, offering detailed assessments of all kinds of needs and sitting in on IPRC’s to assist in designing programs.  At other times the Board hired its own psychologists or pscychometrist to fulfill the role.  In addition, the Resource Staff had a battery of assessment instruments that they could use to evaluate the needs of students.

“Gifted pupils” fell into the category of “intellectual” exceptionality.  Throughout the 80s and 90s we attempted to meet their needs in a variety of ways that were, unfortunately, dependent on what time the Resource Staff had to devote to them with all the other demands upon their time.  I always felt that it was important not to leave them at the bottom of this list of priorities behind the significant number of children with other possibly more visible needs.  Perhaps the most effective method we used was to take a period of days in which the whole Resource Staff would work with our group of pupils from grade 4 to 8.  This allowed us, the classroom teachers and the pupils to fit the program around other demands and provide an intensive and hopefully demanding program.  At one stage pupils from other elementary schools in the Board joined us which led to useful interchanges within the group.  Below are two reports written for the school newspaper in October 1991 and March of 1992 that give you a flavour of the program offered.




In addition to in-school programming, the enrichment students also went further afield.  Trips included a visit to Ottawa stopping along the way to visit the Chalk River Research centre.  It was here that the staff of this nuclear research facility played a trick on our most nervous student.  They checked us all out with a geiger counter to make sure we were contamination free and arranged for it to go off the scales as he passed through - fortunately he didn’t pass out and the joke was quickly revealed.  Ironically, that student went on to work at Chalk River.  We also visited the House of Commons, the Mint, the War Museum, the Museum of Science & Technology, the Museum of Civilization and the National Gallery.  We stayed in a university residence and fell about laughing when the student who had a reputation for grazing at every convenience store along the was was assigned room 711.  On another occasion a group of enrichment students went to a science camp at Brock University.  While in the vicinity we visited the Falls, Fort George, and the Welland Canal.

This was the era when people began talking about “specific learning disabilities” as explanations for the difficulties some children had especially in terms of acquiring language and maths skills.  The Ontario government set up the Trillium School in Milton in 1979 to offer, “... a variety of services to meet the educational and social/emotional needs of students with language-based learning disabilities.”  It is still operating.  The school has a residential capability and pupils from around the province have attended Trillium over the years.  “...  all students attend school during the day and live in our residences during the evening. The residence offers a variety of recreational and social skills programs to complement the academic program. Students return to their home communities on the weekend.”  Another component of the school is a teacher training program.  Teachers were invited to attend a week long course that involved training sessions about learning disabilities and effective teaching strategies to use with children exhibiting them.  It also involved course participants in classroom and evening social activities with the children.  A number of A B Ellis staff members took part in Trillium training sessions in the 1980s.

In May of 1991 the Ministry of Education announced that “.. the integration of exceptional pupils into local community classrooms should be the norm in Ontario, wherever possible, when such a placement meets the pupil’s needs, and when it is according to parental choice.”  Below is an article from the school newspaper at the time outlining the thrust of the Ministry’s position. 

Ironically, this had been pretty much been the policy at A B Ellis all along because we had operated an open inclusive approach welcoming children of all abilities and doing the best we could to accommodate their needs.  One fall-out from this policy direction was that resource teachers were, for a while, “encouraged” to deliver their remedial programs in the student’s classrooms instead of withdrawing them to a resource room for teaching sessions.  A common sight was resource teachers with carts full of teaching materials migrating from class to class.  The practicalities of this approach eventually brought the practice to an end.  Many classrooms were busy, crowded places that exceptional pupils found distracting and resource teachers found challenging to actually find a place to work.  Pupils with similar needs and of similar ages were often located in several different classrooms so, whereas in the past we had been able to get them together in the resource room for a joint teaching session, it might now take three sessions to reach them in three different rooms.  When you added in the traveling time between classes, a lot of valuable teaching time was being wasted.  This was one interpretation of “integration” that was abandoned because it was clearly not what the guidance was referring to and extremely ineffective.

At the end of the 1990s I reduced my time in the Resource Department to take up a part-time role as the school’s computer teacher.  In September of 1998, that role became full-time and brought an end to my 27 years as a Resource Teacher at A. B. Ellis Public School.

David Boardman