Serving culturally diverse 5tudents with emotional or behavioral disorders: Broadening current perspegives

This chapter presents factors identified by experts in the areas of special education, sociology, educational anthropology and psychology, and educational policy analysis that, in totality. It provides a comprehensive perspective on how minority children who live in poverty may be more susceptible to develop emotional or behavioral disorders than their White and middle-class counterparts. The chapter discusses how they overlap and interact to create the problems stated. It examines general recommendations that will facilitate the establishment of more culturally competent systems of care for this group of children. Experts from the mental health field contend that external stressors experienced by many minority children—particularly minority children who live in poverty— place them more at risk than dominant culture children of developing emotional or behavioral disorders. In 1970, the Kamehameha Elementary Education Program was founded to improve the performance of underachieving Native Hawaiian children in language arts.