Wednesday, May 4, 2005 | 9:38 a.m.
It's not every day that an assistant secretary of the Education Department gets serenaded by preschoolers.
Especially when visiting a university.
But John Hager, assistant secretary for the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, yukked it up with the youngsters during his visit Tuesday to UNLV's Lynn Bennett Early Childhood Education Center. About 30 of the center's soon-to-be graduates sang "Each of Us Is a Flower" on Hager's arrival, honoring him with a signed cap and gown from their graduation to kindergarten next week.
The center, nestled in the far northwest corner of UNLV's main campus, serves as a preschool for the children of UNLV students, faculty and staff, as a research laboratory for professors and graduate students and as an instructional setting for future teachers, Thomas Pierce, interim dean of College of Education, said. The center also contracts with the Clark County School District and other local agencies to do developmental assessments and to care for some of the valley's special education children.
"This is exciting," Hager said after accepting about his fourth handmade welcome sign from one of the preschool's more bashful toddlers.
In town for the National Institute on Legal Issues of Educating Individuals with Disabilities conference at the MGM Grand, Hager's visit to UNLV was one of several stops for the assistant secretary as his agency prepares to release its draft regulations for the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA). Hager also spoke with Clark County School District special education officials Tuesday morning at the Gold Coast, met with the nonprofit organization Nevada Parents Encouraging Parents and visited the Yvonne Atkinson Gates Early Childhood Development Center in North Las Vegas.
But Hager said he was particularly impressed with the center at UNLV because of how it incorporated a fully functional preschool into the research and instructional needs of the university.
"I think its heads and shoulders above many," Hager said of the center. "It's very seldom that you have a higher education institution with a facility of this size."
Hager's office has selected UNLV to serve as one of six sites across the nation for public comment on the revised IDEIA regulations, which are due out later this month. The public hearing will take place June 24.
The new regulations will unite the IDEIA act with many of the provisions of No Child Left Behind, Hager said, mandating that special education teachers be highly qualified in their field. Initially, the purpose of IDEIA was to encourage access to education for people with disabilities, but now the focus needs to shift to pursuing excellence in that education.
UNLV's center is working to meet that need, Hager said, particularly with its emphasis on inclusiveness.
Research has proven that students with disabilities learn and progress better when they interact with their non-disabled peers, Hager and other special education officials said, but its also been shown to improve the understanding and well-being of those without disabilities.
For instance, Pierce said, none of the students at UNLV's center even seemed to notice Hager's wheelchair. To them, it was "invisible," but other children who are not used to seeing a wheelchair might have focused on it.
Hager, 68, has been wheelchair bound since a nearly fatal bout with polio in his 30s.
About 10 to 15 percent of the center's 278 preschoolers have some sort of disability, including hearing and visual impairments, developmental disorders, autism, cerebral palsy and Down syndrome, pre-school director Catherine Lyons said. But those children are fully integrated with all of their non-disabled peers, and walking around the center it is nearly impossible to tell which children have disabilities.
Children excel when they "model up," Lyons said.
Hager said he also liked the center's video link system, which allows UNLV students and researchers to observe what students are doing in some of the classrooms at the elementary school next door or in some of the center's own classrooms without obstructing the learning environment.
"The technology is so good that you can zoom in on the handwriting of the kids," Pierce said.
The $5.8 million early childhood development center opened in January 2004 and was paid for primarily with private funding from the Bennett family, Pierce said. The preschool, which has been in operation since the 1970s, self-supports itself on the fees it takes in.
Pierce said he thinks Hager's visit and the national attention UNLV's College of Education recently received in the U.S. News and World Report rankings "brings notoriety to the good work we are doing." U.S. News recently ranked the college's graduate programs No. 82 in the nation and its educational psychology department No. 19.
"I also think it adds to the image of Las Vegas having a strong intellectual community," Pierce said.
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