ABSTRACT
Drug-exposed children came of school age in the late 1980s and early 1990s. After all the media hype about drug-exposed infants and developmental adversities, no one was exactly sure what to expect from these children. Educators had many questions: What were schools to do with crack babies? Would these children be mentally retarded? Would they act like uncontrollable monsters? What were their intellectual capabilities? How would schools teach this population? How much special education funding would be allocated for them? Are existing special education programs designed to address their needs? Would crack-exposed children need an alternative educational setting? The school-age crack kid was a new educational phenomenon. Most importantly, researchers were predicting that in some inner-city school districts, 40 to 60 percent of the children were prenatally exposed to drugs.1
