In 1993, a woman named Dee Begg filed a lawsuit against the school district office of Baltimore County, Maryland. She wanted her son Sean, a developmentally challenged eight-year-old with trisomy 21, also known as Down syndrome, to attend a public school with normal children. Down syndrome is a genetic condition in which a person is born with forty-seven chromosomes instead of the usual forty-six, causing both physical and mental handicaps. Children with Down syndrome often have smaller than normal heads and an abnormal shape. An abnormally large forehead, with upward-sloping eyes, and small ears and mouth are just some of the telltale signs. Children suffering from this disorder display impulsive behavior, poor judgment, short attention span, and slow learning. The average IQ of children with Down syndrome is fifty, compared to normal children whose average IQ is around one hundred. At that time, children with learning difficulties attended special schools with the specific purpose of teaching children with special educational needs. Dee felt that schools that did not allow her son to attend were discriminating against him because of his condition. Dee took her cause all the way to the federal Department of Civil Rights and overturned current laws governing the placement of children with developmental disabilities. This has made it necessary to allow children with learning difficulties to be included in mainstream education systems. The term coined for this process is known as inclusion. Following the verdict, Sean was immediately uprooted from his special education class of like-minded peers at the Ridge School (now Ridge Ruxton) and placed in a first-grade class…paper….. .es be educated in a way that is appropriate to their specific needs while introducing them into normal society. At the same time, normal children are exposed to mentally handicapped children so that they know how to perceive and interact with them when they meet them later in life. While special education schools like Ridge Ruxton (which recently celebrated its fiftieth year of community service) are still open today, serving as an alternative for parents who feel their child with developmental issues should not be part of the traditional education, inclusion has forever changed the way the public education system deals with children with learning disabilities. The initial catastrophe of full inclusion produced in its wake a more developed and ultimately effective system of partial inclusion of people with disabilities into the mainstream education system..