STEVENSVILLE - Wroudy Stephens, 18, peers intently over his wire-rimmed glasses at two rows of large dots on a card.

A classmate across the desk from him holds up the configuration of circles as the Stevensville High School junior concentrates hard on it, pauses, then answers "six."

Hesitating a moment, his hand then moves to a long string of numerals printed in order on a cardboard strip and points to the figure "6."

"Alright Wroudy!" exclaims T.J. Vandehey, 17.

Stephens responds with a large grin. His eyes twinkle.

For the past year and a half, Stephens has diligently worked with Vandehey, his peer tutor, and steadily progressed from barely counting passed two to now ticking off numbers up to 20.

Three years ago, math teacher Stacy Hall wouldn't have believed it was possible.

"He's improved much more quickly working with peer tutors," said Hall, whose class is a mixture of regular and special-needs students.

Stephens, who has Down syndrome, is one of eight students with severe disabilities enrolled at Stevensville High School. About 48 other students with milder disabilities are also part of the special education program, out of the 450-student body at SHS.

Hall's class includes two students with Down syndrome and others with autism, emotional problems and cognitive delays, a term professionals and families now use to describe mental retardation.

Three years ago, school officials adopted a full-inclusion model of special education and mainstreamed all students with disabilities into regular education classrooms.

It's one way to teach special-needs students, one that Mark Hurd, SHS special education coordinator, strongly supports.

Special education is more than just a career for Hurd. The issue is close to his heart: His own son, Austin, a fourth-grader at Chief Charlo Elementary School in Missoula, has Williams syndrome, a rare genetic condition that causes medical and developmental problems.

At Stevensville High School, students with disabilities no longer go to resource rooms or study skills classes. Regular classroom teachers, para-educators and peer tutors teach students with special needs, using a modified curriculum.

"You aren't going to teach them the same material," Hurd said. "You have to adapt."

Before full inclusion, Stacy Hall hadn't worked with students with severe disabilities in her math class. It's been challenging, she said.

"Your approach has to be different, but what you learn from these intense-needs kids applies to other kids, too," she said. "If it works for this child, there's a good chance it will work for others."

Students in Hall's math class vary in capabilities, from hardly able to count to learning measurements, decimals, fractions, percents and pre-algebra.

"It's completely individualized for every student in class," she said. "I've had to learn not to be so rigid. They've taught me a lot about how kids learn."

A student may not be able to count to 100 by fives, but given imitation $5 bills to use as a tool and suddenly he'll easily make the connection.

"The big key for me is the peer tutors and the para-educators helping out in class," she said. "I couldn't do it myself."

For inclusion to work, Hurd is convinced districts must be willing to dismantle the old structure of separate classes and resource rooms.

"Otherwise, if you have it set up that way, that's where most of the kids are going to drift, unless the parents really know what's going on," he said. "You have to structure the regular classes so all kids can be successful in them."

Full inclusion has its critics, especially when teachers don't receive enough additional staff support in the classroom to help those struggling to learn.

Opponents such as the American Federation of Teachers argue that merging students with an extreme range of abilities into general education classrooms can be detrimental to students capable of higher achievement and students with special needs who might learn better with one-on-one class time.

Teacher-led direct instruction becomes nearly impossible, they argue.

"In general, we have opposed full inclusion," said Janet Bass, deputy director of public affairs at AFT's national headquarters.

One of the biggest problems is that schools don't provide enough supports - primarily professionally trained staff - in the regular classroom, she said.

"There are teachers being required to take care of medically fragile students who have never been trained to work with these students," she said. "And there are some students whose disabilities are such where the appropriate environment is a special education room either part or all of the day."

In the early 1990s, full inclusion was attempted in some districts back East and it proved disastrous, she said.

"With no training and no extra help, teachers were worried they would hurt a child," she said. "We're not talking about a different skin color. We're talking about physical and sometimes behavioral disabilities. There are some disabilities that manifest themselves as behavioral problems and the classroom does become disruptive."

This, she said, at a time when the public is clamoring for better and higher achievement.

"The primary purpose of schools today is to educate," she said.

Hurd refers to the bell-curved line on a chart that shows the range of IQ scores. He points to the far left side of the curve that indicates about 25 percent of classroom students have below-average IQ scores - many who aren't enrolled in special education.

Many students in the special education program have IQs that fall into that same area.

"If you can't reach my kid in the classroom, what is it you're doing for the other quarter of the kids that fall in that range?" he asked.

"That's why we're including them (students with disabilities), because they're not so different. If we're keeping these other kids in the regular classrooms, why not them?"

As for the behavioral issue, Hurd said students with such problems, when bunched together in a separate class, are more likely to model each other's bad behavior. Without spending time around peers, they won't learn what is appropriate, he said.

"The benefit I've seen is in the relationships that have developed," he said.

If the next generation of regular education students is comfortable with people with disabilities, then someday when they become business owners or managers, they should be more accepting and less afraid to hire a person with disabilities.

"That's the outcome we are looking for," he said.

The changeover to full inclusion at Stevensville, one of only a few districts in the state to practice it, has its challenges. Not all regular education teachers have embraced the model. School officials hesitate to estimate how many teachers still resist it.

"It's an ongoing process," Hurd said. "You need enough staffing to make the model work. If you've got administrative support and teachers buying into it, it should work."

"It certainly is easier to group kids (in a separate room)," Hurd acknowledged. But he doesn't think that's in the best interest of the kids.

Wroudy Stephens spent eight years in a resource room but didn't learn to count until he joined regular math classes with his peers, Hurd said.

Principal Jim Notaro said full inclusion is working at SHS, but it requires continuous monitoring and collaboration.

"It's been good for the kids," he said. "I'm glad we went to it, but it is an ongoing challenge."

Lessons administrators learned from the inclusion program have prompted some new teaching approaches at Stevensville.

Later this spring, all high school students will take a reading test to identify students - regular and special-needs - struggling with core reading skills. For those who score below a certain level, the school will offer a course next fall.

The high school is also offering an algebra class that will stretch over two years for any student who has difficulty with math and needs to take it at a slower pace, with more intense instruction.

"At the end of the second year, you've completed Algebra I," Notaro said.

Students who might otherwise have given up on algebra are now taking the class, said Mike Kincaid, a SHS special education instructor.

Anita Scothorn, Stephens' mom, is encouraged by full inclusion's impact on her son.

"I think it's really helped," she said. "He has just opened up a whole lot more. I think he feels accepted. They (his classmates) aren't making fun of him; they know who he is now."

Stephens is in a school-to-work program afternoons. He worked at Super 1 Foods last year and now is employed at The Body Works, a fitness center nearby, where he helps out one to two hours each day and receives a paycheck.

He's crafted planter boxes in wood class and learned life skills, such as how to safely cross the street, ride the bus and pay a bill in a restaurant. The planter boxes are part of a greenhouse project that he and his mother hope to grow into a business after he graduates.

Hurd knows his son, Austin, won't ever go to college. So, he asked, what will the child gain sitting in a resource room for four years as opposed to sitting in regular classes?

"My son had a friend sleep over last weekend," he said. If the boy had been in a separate classroom, Hurd doubts that would have happened. His son is developing relationships. If he is selfish, he'll realize his friends won't like him so much.

"Those are lessons that can only occur when you are with other kids," Hurd said.

"I want my son to go to high school, have his heart broken like the rest of us ... and not be in a sheltered environment," he said.

"There is no resource room out there when they graduate," he said.