I would like to caution our witnesses that, in the interest of hearing from everyone, they should summarize the main points of their testimony, and we shall be pleased to insert their complete statements in the official record of the hearings.

If we fail to do that, the Chair wants to observe, it will simply be impossible for us to hear everyone.

Our first witnesses this morning are Dr. Jack Dinger, president-elect of the Council for Exceptional Children and chairman of the department of special education, Slippery Rock State College, Slippery Rock, Pa.

Dr. Dinger is accompanied by William Geer, executive secretary of the council, and Frederick J. Weintraub, assistant executive secretary of the Council for Exceptional Children.

Gentlemen, we are pleased to see you.

STATEMENT OF DR. JACK DINGER, PRESIDENT-ELECT, COUNCIL FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN AND CHAIRMAN OF THE DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL EDUCATION, SLIPPERY ROCK STATE COLLEGE, SLIPPERY ROCK, PA., ACCOMPANIED BY WILLIAM GEER, EXECUTIVE SECRETARY, COUNCIL FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN, AND FREDERICK J. WEINTRAUB, ASSISTANT EXECUTIVE SECRETARY, COUNCIL FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN

Dr. DINGER. Mr. Chairman, I am Dr. Jack Dinger. The Council for Exceptional Children is a national organization of 47,000 members concerned about the education of handicapped children.

The officers and members of the Council for Exceptional Children would like for you to know that we are deeply appreciative of the efforts of this committee over the past years on behalf of handicapped children.

We are particularly impressed and appreciative of your leadership of this committee, Mr. Chairman, and Congressman Hansen. The handicapped has so few people speaking for them that we need every advocate we can get.

Your contributions on behalf of these children have been most significant. The essence of our visit here this morning is to make certain that your committee is aware of the Council for Exceptional Children support of H.R. 4199 which is designed to extend the Education of the Handicapped Act which we recognize as the foundation of all Federal support for the education of handicapped children.

Our formal statement of our support of H.R. 4199 goes into a great deal of depth on each of the six separate program parts of the Education of Handicapped Act and rather than repeating this detailed statistical report I would like to make a few brief comments to illustrate the impact and the importance of this program as we see them.

In this country there are 7 million handicapped children. Six million of these are school age and it seems incredible that in 1973, with all of the wealth and technology that this country possesses, that there are only 212 million or 39 percent of these children now receiving any kind of specialized educational services which their handicap would

Conversely, there are about 311⁄2 million of these children who are receiving no special education services. And it seems even more incredible that 1 million of these children are receiving no educational services whatsoever.

They are not in school at all, still in 1973.

Bad as these numbers may sound, if we put this into perspective, we have made a great deal of progress and things are much better today than they were before the Education of the Handicapped Act programs began back in 1958. There has been a vast improvement in the services available to a rapidly increasing number of handicapped children since that date.

We are greatly impressed also with leadership and services provided through Bureau of Education for the handicapped. And in order to make these services a reality they have done a fine job of implementing this act.

While the majority of financial support for education of handicapped children has come from the States and communities, the Federal stimulation and support to the States and to the teacher training institutions has made much of this surge of progress a reality.

Some of the evidences of this that we have seen has been the appearance quite recently as a direct result of this Federal support by this act of such programs as the education of severely and profoundly retarded and education of the seriously emotionally disturbed and recently the education of preschool handicapped children.

Some States are now creating regional resources to help as in the pooling of deaf and blind children together, that we might educate them through 10 regional centers for the deaf-blind.

I think one of the things we might say this morning about the benefits or the impact of this act was rather well stated by one of our directors of special education in a State who said that the Educationally Handicapped Act funds enable us to get out in front of ourselves and to pull the rest of the system along with us.

We have seen the development of many programs within many States aimed at special target populations such as the early childhood group those from birth to 5 years of age who attempt to intervene before the handicap has developed to such proportions that it could not be solved or it would take much longer time and money to solve it. The model programs that have been developed through these funds of this act have enabled other types of handicapped children in various locations to be established and other States and locations can see these model programs and duplicate them and can set State legislation financing in order to make parallel duplicate models happen.

For the various sections of this act, I am most familiar with the section D, as it relates to the special education manpower production element in the training and special education children.

While you may hear of teacher surpluses in other areas of education I can assure you there is no surplus of teachers in special education. The Bureau of Education for the handicapped reports the needs for special education teachers for all areas of handicaps as reported by all 50 States to be in excess of 245,000 teachers needed today. Mr. BRADEMAS. What was that figure again?

Dr. DINGER. 245,000 teachers of special education required yet to

cial education teacher that we can prepare at Slippery Rock State College has a job waiting for him and in many cases many job offers.

Across the Nation we have set in motion through leadership, a very fine system of teacher training to meet the demand for more of these highly qualified special lists who are needed to supply these 245,000 unfilled classrooms for handicapped children.

If you would permit a personal observation about the growth of these type of programs, I went to Slippery Rock 10 years ago to start a teacher training program in special education.

The program consisted of 26 students and I was the total faculty. Now 10 years later we have over 700 students in this program which represents one out of every nine students on our campus and we have 12 full-time faculty members.

This kind of growth, both in numbers and we hope quality of program, in our institution and all of the teacher training institutions around the country, particularly those funded by VEH, we think are leading to the supply of this huge gap in personnel requirements to serve these 245,000 classrooms that are yet unfilled.

So we plead that we need to finish this manpower production project which this act has so effectively started.

For the sake of brevity, I will not go into the excellent results we see emerging from the research and project for which we hear excellent results being reported.

Our formal statement contains a clear picture of the effects of these services. I would like to give one example of how Federal support from this act did produce a service and a product of national importance which could not and would not have been developed by any State or any college or any commercial publisher and I refer to Project Life, an anachronism for language instruction to facilitate education for the deaf.

As you know, teaching a deaf child and to develop the language to use to express himself and to go about asking for more information is an extremely difficult task. This project has had top specialists in deaf education and language development working on a type of pupil selfinstruction in language development for many years and at a very high cost.

We have had meticulous detailed work going into this and the project has now reached the stage of success where it can be produced and made commercially available to all educators around the country.

We have found that it not only helps deaf children to learn to use his own language system but it has been found to be a great help to retarded, brain damaged and learning disability children as well. This I think will be one concrete example of how Federal funds have been used to make something happen that could not have happened any other way.

In summary the Education of Handicapped Act has done a great deal for handicapped children of the Nation. We of the Council for Exceptional Children do recognize, however, the needs for another 312 million children whose needs are yet unserved by any special educational services which their handicap might require.

A new sense of urgency has been forced upon us by the courts in

we must provide immediately for the educational services to the severely and profoundly retarded who have been denied their educational opportunities in the schools down through history and this landmark decision has been the catalyst for a number of other States and their courts are saying the same thing that these children must be served and must be served now regardless of the cost.

This is going to be paralleled and duplicated by the same court decisions about other types of handicapped children who have been excluded from services in the schools. You have a yellow brochure attached to our formal statement entitled, "A Continuing Summary of Pending and Completed Litigation Regarding the Education of Handicapped Children," regarding education of handicapped children in which these type of court decisions and mandates are presented in very brief form.

All of the 47,000 members of the Council for Exceptional Children are working toward the day when we will be able to say that every handicapped child has been provided with an opportunity for the appropriate educational services, a correctly designed program, and a highly qualified teacher to teach him.

That day will come but it is going to be sometime yet before that day does arrive. The need for further service from the Education of the Handicapped Act is clearly before us and now is not the time to stop this vital service provided under this act.

The Council for Exceptional Children reiterates its strong support of H.R. 4199 and hopes that this committee will give it prompt

attention.

We also hope that at a later date the committee will give its attention to a bill which addresses itself to the even larger question of helping States and communities offset the direct and expensive cost of educating all handicapped children.

Mr. Chairman, the Council for Exceptional Children is proud to note that you have already shown your sensitivity to this larger issue by introducing H.R. 70, the Education of the Handicapped Children's Act.

I should like to thank you very much for this opportunity to present the views of the Council for Exceptional Children on H.R. 4199 today. We of the Council for Exceptional Children again offer any and all assistance we might provide to your future considerations of this final issue and finally if I might add a personal appreciation for the opportunity provided by our national legislative system whereby an unknown person like myself from a very small college and very tiny town in western Pennsylvania, could have the privilege of coming before you here this morning in Washington and adding my views for your consideration of this act.

This is something very good about a government which encourages this type of input from persons like me.

I have been greatly impressed with this new experience of appearing before you on behalf of this act and I think you for hearing me this morning.

STATEMENT OF DR. JACK C. DINGER, PRESIDENT-ELECT, THE COUNCIL FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN, AND PROFESSOR AND CHAIRMAN, DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL EDUCATION, SLIPPERY ROCK STATE COLLEGE, SLIPPERY ROCK, PA.; ACCOMPANIED BY WILLIAM C. GEER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE COUNCIL FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN, WASHINGTON, D.C.; FREDERICK J. WEINTRAUB, ASSISTANT EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR FOR GOVERNMENT RELATIONS, THE COUNCIL FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN

Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, it is indeed a pleasure to come before this distinguished panel to offer the comments of The Council for Exceptional Children relative to The Education of the Handicapped Act from the standpoint of services provided for this nation's handicapped children.

At the outset, let me emphasize again-in concert with the feelings of past officers of The Council for Exceptional Children-the real and deep gratitude of all of us in the special education profession for the remarkable concern for and efforts on behalf of handicapped children demonstrated by this Subcommittee of the Education and Labor Committee, especially in recent years. This committee long ago acknowledged the special responsibility of the national government for the education of America's exceptional children; and the Education of the Handicapped Act is a singular monument to this committee's attention and this committee's diligence.

And to you in particular, Mr. Chairman, may I extend my special thanks. Throughout your stewardship as chairman of this subcommittee, you have been an unrelenting protector of the interests of handicapped children and an equally unrelenting advocate of their special needs.

Let me make it absolutely clear that The Council for Exceptional Children endorses H.R. 4199 to extend the Education of the Handicapped Act, the foundation of present federal support for the handicapped in education.

Permit me to review briefly the components of this most effective legislation : (See Appendix A, expenditures by state for handicapped.)

(See Appendix B, handicapped served by state.)

(See Appendix C, state of EHA, authorization, appropriations.)

AID TO STATES PROGRAM

The state grant program under Part B (Title VI) has acted as a most useful catalyst to local and state program growth. Joint planning with the states under this program has meant increased programming on a comprehensive basis involving other federal programs (such as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act Titles I and III) as well as local services.

With appropriation levels for Fiscal 1972 and Fiscal 1973 totalling $37.5 million, this program has stimulated new educational opportunities for an encouraging 215,000 handicapped children in 1972 according to the Bureau of Education For The Handicapped (See Appendix C). The catalytic effect of what might be described as the "seed monies" provided under Part B should not be underestimated. (See Appendix D, grants by states, Title VI B).

Members of this committee may be interested in noting the unusually wide disparity between the authorization level approved by the Congress for Title VI B for Fiscal 1973 and the estimated actual expenditures for Fiscal 1973, i.e. $200 million compared to the actual $37.5 million. (See Appendix C)

SPECIAL TARGET PROGRAMS

The special target programs under the aegis of Part C of the Education of the Handicapped Act have tremendous impact upon our total effort on behalf of exceptional children. (See Appendix E, special target programs by state.)

For instance, the ten regional Deaf-Blind Centers coordinate resources and services for approximately 1,700 deaf-blind children in those regions. As you know, the number of deaf-blind children increased dramatically as a result of the 1964-65 rubella epidemic. In fact, over 4,500 children have been located and identified through the regional deaf-blind program as of December, 1972. The regional centers provide not only educational services (residential and day care)