Josh's Fourth Anotated Bibliography Entry

Redden, Sandra Cluett , Forness, Steven R. , Ramey, Sharon L. , Ramey, Craig T. and Brezausek, Carl M.(2003) 'Mental Health and Special Education Outcomes of Head Start Children Followed Into Elementary School', NHSA Dialog, 6: 1, 87 — 110

This article focuses on special needs cases that enter the Head Start program. It talks about the 4 major disability categories (speech-language impairment, emotional disturbance, mental disabilities, and learning disabilities) that people may face. Sandra Redden tells us that very few cases of children with disabilities that pass through the Head Start program have been recorded (before her research of course). Since the start of these studies, many new disorders have risen in children coming through Head Start. Redden states, “There are also a number of disorders with early childhood onset, such as fetal alcohol syndrome or prenatal substance abuse, that not only affect learning or cognition, but also have newly recognized behavioral sequel that are not always correctly identified in preschool settings (88).” After talking about these conditions, reddens relates that there may be many children that have not been identified with mental and health conditions. She relays that the rate of identifying these problems has decreased to about 1.1% of total school enrollment. That means that out of every child, only about 1.1% of them have mental or health problems. This may sound like a good thing, but Reddens adds to this statement by saying, “This decline has primarily been at the expense of children with mild mental retardation, resulting from legal restrictions around use of IQ tests and over-identification of children of color (89).” So we can see that there are some restrictions with helping young children with problems. After using many studies that were conducted, Reddens concludes by saying that even though there are many mental and health conditions and cases in the Head Start program, there could be many more. There needs to be a way to properly identify these children while they are young before they leave Head Start. I think that this article complies completely with my other articles. She is talking about identifying problems while in Head Start. One of my last bibliographies talked about not just letting children move ahead if they don't understand the material. This falls under the same category. I haven't ever really thought about mental and health conditions that would impair a child's learning abilities. This does help to shed some new questions and light on this subject.