Mentally troubled students overwhelm schools

[The Straight Story]

Mentally troubled students overwhelm schools
The cigarette lighter sat on the family computer when Gianni awoke.

He said that a voice in his head, the one he sometimes calls Mr. Angry, told him to bring it to school — and threatened to punish him if he didn’t.

Hours later, after getting angry with his teacher, Gianni set fire to a bulletin board outside a special education classroom. The blaze was quickly doused with water bottles, but school officials had him arrested. He was charged with arson.

Gianni, who has been seeing a psychologist since the age of 3, spent the next 37 days in juvenile detention, five times longer than the typical adolescent accused of a crime in Ramsey County.

“I knew setting a fire was bad, but I didn’t belong in there,” said Gianni, who turned 15 while incarcerated. “Sometimes, my brain thinks of horrible things I don’t want to do.”

Gianni is one of thousands of students afflicted with serious mental health problems who are flooding into Minnesota schools because they have nowhere else to go.

Their complex needs are bringing huge and at times dangerous challenges to special education classrooms that are already struggling to handle increasing numbers of students with other handicaps, including multiple disabilities.

http://www.startribune.com/local/216300511.html