The problem goes unnoticed

By now it's clear to nearly everyone that our schools are hemorrhaging. Special education, learning assistance programs, assessment services, and family advancement workers are disappearing, class sizes are growing, and increasing paperwork demands are diverting teachers' attention away from their students. Children with special needs are hardest hit by these changes. Since the phrase "children with special needs" is rather abstract, it's useful to consider specific segments of this population when trying to humanize this academic bloodletting. For the sake of this article, I'm going to focus on children with nonverbal learning disorders (NLD), a group too often overlooked in discussions about the education system.

NLD is caused by deficiencies in either the brain's right hemisphere or the white matter mylinating the brain's neurons. In either case, NLD reduces the co-ordination among various regions of the brain. Since language abilities are relatively localized in the brain, they're largely unaffected, forcing people with the disorder to develop their language skills to compensate for their weaknesses in other domains. In a sense, NLD is a kind of reverse dyslexia.

The condition afflicts approximately one percent of the population. That means a school with 1,000 students will, on average, have 10 kids who suffer from NLD. The majority of sufferers have average or above-average IQ scores; their deficits in executive functions, organizational ability, motor skills, and social interaction are juxtaposed with strong language skills. These strengths often mask their underlying problems, causing them to go undiagnosed throughout their entire lives. To lack a diagnosis, however, hardly protects them from the consequences of their disorders.

The most painful of these consequences is social rejection, something these children are extremely vulnerable to. Because they process nonverbal information inefficiently, they make many social blunders. In conversations, they ramble without allowing others to take their turns, they impulsively interrupt people, they don't take other people's perspectives into account, and they casually share information that's inappropriately intimate. Their faces are unexpressive, they make poor eye contact, and they intrude upon other people's personal space. They feel bewildered in large groups, they can't read body language, and they don't know how to manage their own emotions. On top of all this, they're clumsy. These kids are the pariahs of the playground.

The circle can be reversed

Their social troubles aggravate their neurological problems. The human brain responds to social rejection the same way as to physical injury. Social rejection triggers activity in the anterior cingulate corte, the part of the brain responsible for causing negative reactions to pain. This, in turn, produces anxiety, which floods the brain with cortisol, adrenaline, and other stress hormones, and which blocks the production of serotonin, the chemical that soothes emotional distress. In cases of prolonged anxiety, these reactions can cause the brain's chemistry to become chronically deregulated, which dramatically limits the brain's ability to learn from experience.

This creates a vicious circle: ostracism causes these children emotional pain, which increases their level of fear, which deregulates their neural chemistry, which intensifies their learning problems, which impairs their social and coping skills, which prompts their peers to ostracize them all the more. Their problems are compounded if they live in poverty-stricken or dysfunctional families. These families are often unable to provide children with the physical and psychological nutrients their growing brains need, and children in these situations are more likely to experience emotional traumas than their peers. Such factors exacerbate learning disorders, making it much harder for these children to form stable and emotionally healthy identities.

Unless they receive the support they need, these kids will have little to look forward to in their adult lives. The literature suggests that most adults with nonverbal learning disabilities are single, living with their parents or relatives, involved in very few recreational, social and community activities, and suffering from depression and anxiety disorders. Unemployment and underemployment are common in this population. Many become dependent upon mental health services, while others end up in the corrections system.

The educational system is a critical variable in the lives of children with NLD. If their schools can give them the attention and support they need, they have a much better chance of carrying the many burdens that life will place upon their shoulders. Many of these children have gifts that will flourish if they're given the proper environment, gifts that have the potential to someday offset their limitations. Through the intervention of specialized programs and staff, NLD kids can develop communication skills and find ways to succeed in their schoolwork. These programs can also influence the culture of our schoolyards, reducing the incidence of bullying and encouraging tolerance and compassion throughout the student body. Without such programs, the prognosis for these children is grim.

Since their neurological functioning is compromised both by their disorders and by constant social rejection, it's unfair to expect these children to overcome their problems through simple willpower or positive thinking. It's time to abandon our comforting platitudes about children's resiliency and admit the obvious: without the ongoing help of their communities, these lambs are going to be slaughtered.

Thanks to the provincial Liberals, very few of these children are receiving the assistance they require. Today in BC, only the needs of the most severely challenged students can even begin to be addressed. Students who are able to scrape by without making a significant fuss—that is, students who don't get into too many fights, whose attendance is adequate, and who maintain marginally passing grades—receive barely any support at all, even if their days are filled with confusion, helplessness, and misery.

Of course, children with NLD are only some of the kids affected by the Liberal's cuts. Every special needs child in British Columbia—every kid who has Asperger's Syndrome, Attention Deficit Disorder, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or any of the other horrors afflicting children's brains—has felt the budgetary knife. Think for a moment about how many of these children are losing hope because of this government's mean-spirited policies.

I, for one, would like to see services restored to these students, but that's not going to happen as long as the Liberals are in power. For all their conservative blather about children and families, the Liberals have decided to abandon these kids.

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