Battle Erupts Over the Future of Special Education - The Bay Citizen

Battle Erupts Over the Future of Special Education

Tensions rise as district plans to shutter a Bayview school, with more cutbacks on the way

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By TREY BUNDY on June 18, 2011 - 10:21 a.m. PDT

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Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen

Shelley Lobell, founder and executive director of the Erikson School, works with her students to move school supplies into storage on Wednesday, June 15, 2011

A plan to close a small school for children with severe behavioral problems is mushrooming into a larger battle over how the San Francisco Unified School District treats special-education students.

In recent months, the district signaled that it intended to end its 31-year partnership with the nonprofit Erikson School in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco and eventually reassign its 16 students to mainstream programs.

That would be just one of many such moves. Facing a $25 million budget deficit, the district intends to transfer all of its 6,000 special-education students into mainstream programs in the public schools over the next several years. The district spends about $122 million a year on special-education services.

The battle over Erikson, which has received $2.5 million during the last five years while

Source: The Bay Citizen (http://s.tt/12GoZ)

Local Intelligence: Audium, San Francisco

by Andy Wright

An unassuming building on Bush Street in San Francisco shelters Audium, billed as a theater of sculptured sound. Stan Shaff began the sound experiment more than 50 years ago. In a room that looks like a set piece from the original “Star Trek,” audience members in total darkness are immersed in what Shaff calls “sound choreography”: a cornucopia of sounds, from running water to galloping horses to electronic music. Spacing Out Shaff is a classically trained trumpeter who derives much of his inspiration from playing antiphonal “call and response” music. He conducted some of his earliest experiments with space and sound with the help of his friend Seymour Locks, the pioneer of rock ’n’ roll light shows. In the Round Audium, at 1616 Bush, seats 49 in a circular

Saturday, June 18, 2011