Recently, Judi Welch received an "apple for the teacher" unlike any she'd received before.

The NBC4 Crystal Apple Award, to be precise.

Welch, an Extension education instructor and Wilshire Crest Elementary School teacher, recently was honored by the television station for her work as a role model in the field of special education and for her ability to inspire a high level of achievement from her students. The award ceremony, televised on Channel 4, took place in her kindergarten classroom.

"I don't think they really understood what the award was about, because they're so young," Welch said of her students. "But when they saw (reporter) Kim Baldonado walk in with this turquoise-blue box from Tiffany's and hand it to me, they were very excited. They saw that their teacher got a present."

Welch's special-education class then performed a play with the general-education kindergarten class, demonstrating what Welch's work is all about: mainstreaming children with disabilities into the general education setting. "NBC focused on how well my kids fit in with the general-ed kindergarten," she said. "It's just one group of 5-year-old kids, not the special-ed kids and the general-ed kids."

While Welch concentrates most of her energy on her pre-kindergarten, kindergarten and first grade classes at Wilshire Crest, she also takes time out to teach adults. Every other quarter, she trains future educators in a course called "Principles and Practices of Teaching Exceptional Learners in the Regular Classroom," offered through UCLA Extension. Her students in those classes - teachers who have had at least some classroom experience - learn about laws, guiding practices, strategies to mainstream children appropriately and ways to adapt instruction physically and academically. Welch also mentors two brand-new teachers a year through Extension's Urban Intern Teacher Preparation Program.

A polio survivor herself, Welch has been as big an influence on her own four children as she has been on her students. Her oldest son, Eric, 33, is a teacher; daughter Jill, 30, is a teacher who is getting her master's degree in special education; stepson Erik, 29, was a computer instructor; and her youngest daughter, Holly, 25, is the assistant director of a foreign-language school. It was Jill who nominated her mother for the Crystal Apple award.

"When I received the award, Kim Baldonado asked me what my message was. I remembered a saying that they have in the community of people with disabilities: 'Look at the person, not the disability,' " Welch said. "And my goal is to normalize the lives of my students and have them become productive members of society. I want people to see them as normal children who have the same feelings and social needs and educational needs as able-bodied children.

"As I tell my students at UCLA, we're all TABs: temporarily able-bodied people. And you never know from one moment to the next."