11/06/07

About Aseltine School

Each year in San Diego County 50,000* children are removed from “mainstream” classrooms and placed into special education programs.  The majority of these children experience success and flourish in their specialized programs.  However, a small percentage do not succeed and are passed from program to program in an attempt to meet their needs.  These are the students of Aseltine School.

These students are in crisis.  Their experience of prolonged failure has destroyed their self-esteem and created additional emotional difficulties, often making them angry and rebellious toward authority and academia.  Their socially disruptive behavioral choices at home, in the community and at school have created a habitual rift that, combined with their learning differences, threatens their future success as adults.

By the time students reach Aseltine School, they have not been successful in every other special education program available to them.  Aseltine is one of their last opportunities for educational success, while remaining independent, before they face in-patient institutionalization, or in the most severe cases, incarceration in San Diego juvenile Detention Facilities. 

Some students have already spent time in these institutions and require intensive strategies to prevent them from returning.  The costs associated with residential care and incarceration are staggering, nearly $5,000,000** and 3,000,000** respectively per person over a lifetime.  Because the majority of these students come from indigent circumstances, the San Diego community will be expected to absorb these costs.

Yet a significantly less costly alternative exists.  Aseltine School is successful at making a difference in these children’s lives.  There are other schools in San Diego serving the emotionally disturbed and learning disabled, but none has the expertise, or the history of success in working with some of the most difficult to reach urban/inner city youth, that Aseltine does.

* Figure based on 2002 number from San Diego County Schools.