KEY POINTS:
The little girl in the pink dress smears peanut butter over her rice cracker with abandon. By the time we leave she has given up attempting to use the knife. Her hands are in the jar, the brown goo smeared over her face.
"She gets overexcited," says Diane Hankins, principal of Sommerville Special School which specialises in the education of severely disabled children. "She was mainstreamed for a while but now she's had to come back so we can calm her down again."
The special-needs children in this room are primary age. Most are autistic, and all are only just verbal. The staff ratio is three teachers to six children.
Up the back the problems are more serious. A girl lies immobile, spreadeagled, face down, on a walking frame - covered in foam rubber - that's designed to support her at every angle. "It gets her out of the wheelchair, helps teach her to support herself."
Another, her ankles in splints, eating from a tray on her chair, speaks beautifully in short bursts before her head droops again.
But it is the final room, where those reaching Sommerville's cut-off age of 21 slump in chairs and frames, that is the most harrowing. None of these people can talk, most can't walk or toilet themselves. "These are the ones considered very high-needs, the ones who need a teacher ratio of one to two students - and the top funding of $15,702 a year."
"When the special-needs children come here at 5 they can be developmentally at 18 months and extremely hard to manage," Hankins says. "The worst irony is that after years of coaxing and training, after we work on them until they can say a few words, can feed themselves, and sometimes use the toilet, they're re-evaluated and sometimes lose that funding".
Over at Cockle Bay primary school in Howick, little Ashley Shepherd is also at the high end of disability. At 8 she has her own teacher aide and her own computer monitor that displays the words large so she can see them. A sweet little girl who is still excited after her morning with Riding for the Disabled, she stands there in her blue and white sports gear, showing us her special desk.
As the school's special education co-ordinator, Jayne de Groot, explains, Ashley has cortical vision impairment, which means she has trouble focusing. As well, she has mild cerebral palsy that makes her weak down the right side so she has trouble sitting at a desk. She needs support the whole time, including playtime and lunch. "But," says de Groot, "Even with high-needs funding and topping up by the board she's only funded for 4.5 hours a day."
In other words, Ashley has to spend some time in the classroom without her aide, Kate Godfrey, there to help.
Principal Graeme Lomas says: "It's okay, we manage. The teacher just has to manage. What else do you do?"
Because the Cockle Bay board of trustees and teaching staff want to help special needs children, it has more than the usual share. Some come from out-of-zone and other families with special needs children have moved into the area because the school is so good. It is what educationists call a "magnet" school, but it is a title Lomas and his staff want to shake.
"We accepted the out-of-zone special students, but we wouldn't now," he says. "We can't afford them. The board can't resource them and achieve their aims for the rest of the school."
Peter Gull, principal of Papatoetoe High and president of the senior principal's association, notes that there has been a definite "tightening up" of the funding application process.
"The whole thing around special needs students is a major resourcing concern," Gull says. "Schools are having to use money other than that earmarked for special needs."
Cockle Bay's six seriously disabled children gobble up not only their own special funding but a large top-up from the school. Five are directly funded by the Ongoing and Reviewable Resourcing Schemes (ORRS) which adds up to $69,786 a year between them, topped up by $46,416 from the board of trustees. Then there is a $21,021 special education grant (SEG) which is provided to all schools on a school population percentage basis, to fund other less-disabled students.
"Unfortunately," says Lomas, "our entire SEG budget can be taken up by one seriously disruptive student, leaving our classroom teachers to care for the less-needy kids.
"It's a constant struggle. I think it's quite immoral. Every school in the country agrees that especially the high-to-medium sector is underfunded."
Inadequate as the money might be, the paperwork involved in getting it is astounding. Just the description of criteria for a student covers 17 close-typed pages.
Assessment, which usually takes place just before school age and often again at 7, requires a week's work by a specialist educator, who must first consult parents, doctors, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, preschool teachers, teacher aides, and possibly opthalmology reports, audiograms and more before answering six pages of questions which are then assessed by three verifiers at the Ministry of Education. Although verifiers may visit schools to observe children themselves, they rarely do so.
The process is onerous. When Cockle Bay applied to have their ORRS children reassessed - by four people from Auckland-based Group Special Education - it took five full days of speaking to parents, teachers, aides and therapists, and observing the children "Then they sent their findings off - and we got about $2000 more [over the whole group]," says Lomas says.
"It could have been worse. One school got its funding denied."
For parents who have to sign a form that sets out, in black and white, just how disabled their children are, it is a humiliating, hope-sapping process. "It's so hard for the families," Hankins says. "I try to comfort them by telling them that for their kiddies to qualify for funding we have to fill out the forms that describe them on their very worst day."
The biggest problem for Cockle Bay are special needs children who don't get funding, yet need enormous support in the classroom, including individual education programmes - both to learn themselves and to allow their classmates to learn too. "Our autistic children aren't funded at all and I've just had an application [for ORRS funding] declined because the child doesn't meet the criteria," says Lomas, going on to explain that the child, who was assessed just before he turned 5, was well enough to play nicely in the kindergarten sandpit.
"But he can't sit in a classroom. Luckily at the moment we are able to have two teachers in that class so we can manage him."
De Groot, who like all the people who work in this sector seems ground down by the experience says: "We're told we try too hard. You either try too hard and really help the children and become a magnet school or ... It's a constant battle for the parents outside school as well as in school."
Imagine the upset, then, when the sector learned that before last year's Budget the Ministry reported to its Minister, Steve Maharey, that potential savings in Vote Education included a $23,498 million "underspend" on ORRS from 2006 to 2010.
Although the Ministry now says it was merely a forecasting mistake and ORRS funding is demand-driven and uncapped, the sector, especially in mainstream schools, is in trouble. Too few children qualify for the highest levels of funding - and those who qualify do not get enough to buy them the level of support they need in the mainstream.
Additional funding is not easy to access. A supplementary learning support scheme for a further 1500 slightly less disabled children, works on yet another formula - and offers a miserable 0.1 - or half a day - of a learning support teacher.
Despite the unrest, the outgoing head of Group Special Education, Barbara Disley, can offer no real solutions. Again and again she explains how there is more money going into the sector and sympathises with schools that have more special needs students than others.
"There's always a tension between what we now perceive to be possible and what resources we've got to work with," she says. "About $7.5 million a year goes into schools that have a disproportionate number of special-needs kids. They can apply for that extra resource, the enhanced programme fund ... "
In fact, say teachers and principals, the system is over-complicated and the many pots of money too diverse and hard to access - and designed to keep costs as low as possible, forcing schools to fill the gaps with money designated for ordinary students.
The policy framework, Special Education 2000, goes back to the 1996 Budget.
This laid out that disabled children were entitled to the same rights, freedoms and responsibilities as their peers and promised them access to a seamless education from the time their needs were identified to post-school options.
In other words, by law, special needs students have the right to an education like everybody else.
Embedded in students' rights is the right to be educated, not just in one of Auckland's 11 special school like Sommerville but in the mainstream, which has appeal to parents anxious for their children to learn and play alongside their more able friends.
Hankins says the key is not just to get the children into the mainstream but to achieve collaboration between special schools, ministry specialists, and mainstream principals and teachers. "So much expertise is locked up in our special schools. We can offer so much expertise that will help."
The Ministry of Education, through Group Special Education, allocates ORRS funding directly to the most disabled 1 per cent of students, while all schools get an SEG based on the size of rolls rather than numbers of special students.
Teachers say that in 1997 they were "sold" the new system on the proviso that between 1.5 and 2 per cent of special-needs students would receive the high funding. Now even the 1 per cent are under-funded.
Over the past seven years, ORRS funding, adjusted for inflation, has dropped by 10 per cent a student. That's why the mainstream schools that attract clusters of special-needs students because of the support they offer are being forced to back away.
"Picture a classroom of 7-year-olds containing a special-needs student who calls out or yelps every 20 seconds," says National Education spokeswoman Katherine Rich. "After a while some children block his noise out, but others can't. They fidget, giggle, constantly turn around.
"It becomes near impossible for the teacher to keep their attention. And it's distracting to the student - and the teacher."
Rich, who has two young children, says families with disabled children - more than any other group - line up at her electorate office for help.
"There's a hell of a lot spent on special education bureaucracy that simply does not make it to the front line at all," she says. "And also now we've seen these sneaky cuts and underspend. So many kids who've traditionally had 20 hours [funded] a week have been cut back to 10 or five.
"Parents have really reasonable expectations about their kids. They'll tell me, 'I know my boy's not a rocket scientist but I just want him to have the best education he can have, to be the very best he can be.'
"I utterly believe in mainstreaming but if you're going to embrace that philosophy it does cost. And if you have kids that are under-resourced there is a cost, not just to them but to other students in that class."
A week of research throws up three reviews into special education, with another $790,000 survey scheduled for September.
In the past seven years the Education Ministry has grown from 2890 to 3249, consultants not included. Yet back at the sharp end, de Groot is filling out the forms of eight pages or more, fighting for funding for children such as Ashley.
Think about Ashley's Mum, Tirzah, who spends her life moving between slices of funding for her daughter's care and managing her daughter's complex needs herself - with only 28 days off (respite care) a year so she and her husband can relax.
Think about the teachers and their other pupils, constantly disrupted by children with Asperger syndrome, mental health problems, and ADHD, who don't qualify for funding for a teacher aide.
Think about the Sommerville teachers at who regularly resuscitate, suction, tube-feed and give oxygen to their special-needs students.
"That's the level of medical need of these children," says Hankins, "and we're teachers doing it."
And what happens when they go home from school? "What we ask of our parents is inhuman."
What they get
* Very high needs (can't walk, talk, toilet, feed unaided): $15,702 a year.
* High needs (minimal speech, independent activity): $9107 a year.
* Special education grant (covers autism to mental problems and ADHD), works on a decile-adjusted per capita grant. For example, Point England primary (decile 1A) with 450 students: $22,000 a year.
Who gets verified
Examples from the guidelines on who receives the top level of funding:
* Jenny: 4 years 9 months
Jenny is able to finger-feed. She drinks from a spout. Jenny sometimes raises her arms to help with undressing. She shows no recognition when she is wet or soiled. Jenny has learned to walk in the past year.
Jenny smiles at a familiar person and is starting to make babbling sounds.
* Ravi: 4 years 9 months
Ravi has very little functional movement and is reliant on an adult for all his positioning, mobility and personal care. Ravi has a customised wheelchair with head support and chest harness. He also has a standing frame and tolerates being put in it for short periods. When lying on his front on the floor, Ravi can hold his head up briefly and roll on to his back.
