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Mornings at Rogers Elementary School find teacher Ken Hosto welcoming his students with an enthusiastic greeting and a handshake.

"When my students get off the bus, we don't huddle them and shuffle them into the classroom," he says. "They run to the playground with their classmates."

His approach to his students — children with autism — is emblematic of the campus atmosphere of inclusion.

So when Hosto learned TUSD officials had recommended Rogers and three other elementary schools be closed, he questioned how his students would adjust to a new campus that won't have the same culture of understanding and care for his students that was developed over time.

Hosto isn't the only person who's concerned. Parents, principals and staffers at Corbett, Ochoa, Rogers and Wrightstown elementary schools all question the effects on special programs, should the campuses be shut and their programs moved.

Although Tucson Unified School District officials acknowledge that campus and community programs will lose something in the transition, they remain optimistic that the relocation will benefit students and the community.

Within TUSD's sprawling 230-square-mile district of nearly 60,000 students, there are more than 7,700 special-education students. Four percent of them — 320 children — have been diagnosed with autism. TUSD has more than 100 schools; 14 have self-contained classrooms for students with autism. Rogers, 6000 E. 14th St., is one of four with two such classrooms.

Every school on the list for closure also has some form of the Opening Minds Through the Arts program.

Corbett, 5949 E. 29th St., one of the original sites of the prestigious arts program, is one of 14 schools with a fully implemented program. That means an arts-integration specialist is on staff, along with seven teaching artists who work two days a week for 32 weeks of the school year. The program was refined through work at Corbett.

Students from Wrightstown, 8950 E. Wrightstown Road, in its second year of a partial Opening Minds Through the Arts program, would go to Henry Elementary School, 650 N. Igo Way, and Bloom Elementary School, 8310 E. Pima St., neither of which now has the program.

In a strange twist of fate, Ochoa, 101 W. 25th St., started its Opening Minds Through the Arts program this school year with funds from a $100,000 national prize recently awarded to program founder Gene Jones.

Corbett's Gifted and Talented Education program has 125 students, most of whom are from outside the neighborhood, officials say. The students will go to Kellond Elementary School, 6606 E. Lehigh Drive, which has a gifted-student program.

Each school also houses community programs, such as adult English-language classes at Corbett, Girl and Boy Scouts of America groups at Wrightstown and an after-school tutoring program at Ochoa.

About 40 Corbett parents attend the English classes, said Corbett Principal Joyce Dillon. Many walk from within the neighborhood, she noted.

Joan Ashcraft, TUSD's director of Fine Arts/Opening Minds Through the Arts; Lorraine St. Germain, executive director of exceptional education; and TUSD Superintendent Roger Pfeuffer say the programs can be housed at the receiving schools if the four elementary schools are closed.

Bloom and Henry, they say, can receive programs for which they had been waiting.

Pfeuffer said it doesn't make sense to incur further debt and keep schools open for some small neighborhood programs that likely could be housed at another, nearby TUSD school.

But the cultures of each campus — peer support for students with autism, campuswide collaboration with artists and historical community involvement — can't be transferred as easily.

Rogers' students, Hosto said, those with autism and their peers, have grown up in an environment in which autism is explained and those students are included in campus activities and mainstream classes.

Inclusion is key, he said.

"I want to teach my students how to go to school," he said. "Special-education students are typically grouped with their peers and taught to be special-education students."

St. Germain said she is confident students with autism will be served at Wheeler Elementary School, 1818 S. Avenida del Sol, even though the school began its one-room, self-contained program only last year.

Principal Dillon said campus-wide integration of unique programming doesn't happen overnight. "It's the same with OMA. I'm passionate about it and will make it work anywhere I go, but to just transplant it doesn't make it happen."

She explained: "It takes time to build it, and it takes time to incorporate the state standards into lesson plans."

Pfeuffer acknowledged that the programs will suffer some from the transfer, but he said the unique connections and nuances were created by professionals in collaboration with the community, an expectation at every school.

"Ochoa is a tough one, in terms of its history," he said.

Heidi Aranda, principal of the South Side school, said there are students at Ochoa who come from outside the neighborhood, who are enrolled because their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents attended the school. Likewise, because many students live within walking distance, parental and neighborhood involvement is high.

Beatriz Quijada, the mother of 9-year-old Stephanie Monreal, likens Ochoa's atmosphere to an extended family.

Stephanie, classified with memory and reading disabilities, struggled at two schools before her family found Ochoa. Through the federally funded Reading First program, she receives the support she needs, said her mother and her principal.

Pfeuffer said the district hopes to move the program to Safford Elementary School, 200 E. 13th St., where Ochoa students will be relocated.

Though the schools are only about one mile apart, there is a language gap, Aranda said. Most Ochoa events and meetings are in Spanish, she explained, and she worries that won't be the case at Safford.

Interpreters are available to TUSD parents and at school functions, but parents who don't speak English are less likely to speak up, Aranda said, out of fear and embarrassment.

That's not the case with Ochoa's teachers and staffers.

"That's important to me because they understand, simply, what I'm saying, and I know immediately what is going on with my daughter, the intervention and at the school," Quijada said in Spanish. "I can speak directly with them."