Governor Receives Bill to Extend State’s Special-Education Program for Disabled

SACRAMENTO — The Senate passed and sent to Gov. George Deukmejian Wednesday legislation to extend for five years the state’s special-education program for students with handicaps.

The action ensures that state guidelines for the special-education program can continue even if the governor follows through with his threat to veto a separate bill that extends the life of several programs for gifted, needy, handicapped and American Indian students.

Deukmejian has said that he will refuse to sign bills that include more than one of the so-called “categorical” programs, which set standards for how local school districts may use restricted pots of state education money. The money itself is contained in the state budget and will continue to flow to the special programs this year regardless of legislative action.

Democrats have tried to tie the programs together in an effort to force Deukmejian to keep them all. Democratic leaders recently abandoned as a lost cause their attempt to also tie the state’s controversial bilingual education program to the others.

Signature Expected

Kevin Brett, the governor’s press secretary, said Deukmejian will probably sign the special-education legislation, passed 31 to 7 by the Senate Thursday.

“He is expected to look upon it favorably,” Brett said. “The governor has been a strong supporter of the special-education program.”

But Brett said the governor likely will veto another measure sent to him Monday that would keep alive state guidelines for the programs aimed at gifted, handicapped, needy and American Indian students in kindergarten through grade 12.

“We have indicated to interested legislators that, if they are going to extend the program requirements for the categorical programs, the governor would prefer to see each program addressed separately in individual bills,” Brett said. “If they put it all in one bill, what happens if there are programs he agrees with and programs he doesn’t agree with? He would have to veto the entire bill.”

The Senate debate Thursday focused less on the special-education program than on the politics surrounding the entire education funding issue.

Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) said it was unfair to separate special programs for American Indians, for example, from those for the physically or mentally handicapped.

“To separate them, to divide them, is a partisan and political act,” Torres said. “To include them, to encompass all of them, is an act of compassion and an act of vision.”

But Sen. John Seymour (R-Anaheim), the bill’s author, said it made more sense to save special education for the handicapped than to drop it for the sake of making a political point with the governor. He said he believes that supporters of the bilingual education program guidelines, which expired in 1987, are still hoping for some last-ditch way to reverse their defeat.