ELK GROVE, Calif. – Special education students are relegated to trash duty at Franklin High School as part of their “Independent Living Skills” class, but at least one of their classmates doesn’t think it’s right.

Senior Abigail Taylor told the Sacramento Bee that she first noticed a special education student with a trash can strapped to his wheelchair when she was a freshman, and she’s determined to end the “demeaning” practice before she graduates next year.

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“I don’t want to see this going on for another year and have freshmen coming and saying, ‘Oh, this is how Franklin treats its special education students,’” the 17-year-old said.

Taylor believes the trash duty belies the district’s stated mission of “providing a learning community that challenges all students to realize their greatest potential.” At least 362 students, parents, and teachers who signed a petition to change the trash program this spring agree with her.

Franklin High School has about 160 students with special needs, and 18 were enrolled in the Independent Living Skills class last year. Those students were “invited” to pick up garbage on a rotation and some received minimum wage through a state “WorkAbility” program for students with disabilities, Elk Grove district spokeswoman Xanthi Pinkerton told the Bee.

Others in the class who participate in the trash pickup are not paid, but all are given shirts emblazoned with “Trainee/EGUSD/WorkAbility Works” so they “feel it’s something important that they’re doing,” she said.

Taylor described the work as a punishment that prompts her able-bodied classmates to leave their trash behind “for the students in the ILS class to clean up,” the news site quoted from her research essay.

ILS Program Specialist Kit D’Arezzo said participating special education students rotate between trash duty and duties in the library, cafeteria, office and student microbusinesses that teach them “soft skills” like following the rules and a schedule to complete tasks.

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“They are not responsible for cleaning up a campus that has 2,800 students on it. They are not the cleanup crew,” D’Arezzo said. “They are using this to learn a variety of other skills, and it’s not the same students every day and every year.”

D’Arezzo said the ILS program is used in some form at all nine Elk Grove high schools.

Legal experts seem to agree with Taylor that reserving trash duties for special education students is unfair, and wrong.

Special education law attorney Richard Ruderman told the Bee that Elk Grove’s special needs students “are doing a task that others are going to perceive, and they, themselves, may perceive, is often punishment.

“That’s a concern. That raises a host of things, like you’re punishing a kid just because they’re disabled,” he said. “That sends a red flag to me of discrimination.”

Taymour Ravandi, senior attorney with Disability Rights California, agreed.

The trash duty “flies in the face of individualization … of nondiscrimination law and our own morality of not stigmatizing people.”

“I think there are so many other ways to teach a skill that doesn’t stigmatize that child among his friends,” Ravandi said.

Taylor’s petition and persistence about exposing the treatment of special needs students at Franklin forced school officials to organize a meeting to discuss the issue in August.

After two mission trips – to Guatemala and Nicaragua – to help children with special needs through the BRIGHT Children International program, Taylor told the Bee it only made sense to extend the same compassion to her classmates at home.

“I saw what was going on with their special-needs kids, and the kids at Franklin were being treated as badly as kids in Guatemala,” she said. “It finally struck me to do something about it.”