WHEN we last met Heather Joyce, not quite two years ago, she was running around the Aura elementary school in Elk Township sticking a video camera in students' faces, helping them to create a sometimes ridiculous, sometimes touching morning newscast.

These days, she's doing the same thing at the new Bankbridge Regional School in the Gloucester County town of Sewell. The difference is that the 340 students at Bankbridge are all disabled.

Ms. Joyce, who used to work in grown-up television news in Philadelphia, had a pretty good formula at Aura: pint-sized anchors would read the lunch menu and announcements, another child would do the weather, still others would offer feature stories about goings-on at school, and the whole thing would be broadcast over the school's closed-circuit television system.

Her approach at Bankbridge is the same, but this is a very different world indeed. The school, which was dedicated in June 2000, is a sprawling complex for students from kindergarten through high school, most of them from Gloucester County but others referred from places like Camden. The range of disabilities represented is daunting: there are students with severe behavioral problems, students with baffling developmental delays, students in wheelchairs, students with Down syndrome or autism.

Putting all disabled students in one place is a red-flag notion to a lot of parents and educators, who think of it as warehousing. But if Bankbridge Regional is a warehouse, it's an awfully elaborate one.

The county, rather than try to get by with the minimum, seems to have gone the other direction. Ms. Joyce, for instance, is ecstatic that the equipment she has available for her news show is several cuts above the makeshift operation at Aura. And throughout the school, public money has been augmented with a heartening amount of corporate support. The Wawa chain has created an miniature store where students can learn money-handling and other skills. Home Depot has provided a wood shop and training to go with it. There are Apple computers all over the place.

''We didn't have to twist anybody's arm,'' Samuel Lee, the director of curriculum, said of the corporate help.

Walk around the school with him and Michael C. Dicken, the principal, and they can't stop pointing at the various goodies -- the horticultural operation, where students learn plant care, flower arranging and such; the ''independent living'' room, where on one recent day autistic students were trying to master the seemingly simple task of folding clothes.

The school places a heavy emphasis on behavior, trying to impose a sense of order on disrupted lives. Privileges like shopping at the school store don't just come automatically.

''Everything's earned,'' Mr. Dicken said. And another staff member chimed in, ''Like life.''

As different as Bankbridge is from a mainstream school, what's striking is that when asked about the role Ms. Joyce's modest newscast can play, the administrators said roughly what their counterparts at Aura did: doing the news can build students' self-esteem, teach them professionalism, bring different parts of a large school together. So maybe in that respect, this ''special'' school isn't so special at all.

Certainly Ms. Joyce takes that approach when it comes to filming the students. ''The idea is not to accentuate the disability,'' she said. ''It's to show that they're just the same as everybody else.''

Not that there aren't challenges in working with such students. ''They become frustrated much more easily here,'' Ms. Joyce said. Filming students with behavioral problems, for instance, is a hit-or-miss proposition; some days, the students are simply too off-the-wall to focus on the task.

Other times, Ms. Joyce finds herself trying to provide that extra dose of confidence that a disabled student often needs. She told the story of Tina, a 12-year-old with physical problems that include having to use a tracheal tube.

To talk, Tina has to cover the tube with her hand. She was supposed to be the reporter on a recent story about a school pretzel sale, but she was dismayed when she found that she didn't have enough hands to simultaneously hold the tube, her script and the microphone.

Ms. Joyce told her she could report the story sitting down, with the microphone set on a desktop, but Tina was still a bit distraught.

''She said, 'I've never seen a reporter sit down,' '' Ms. Joyce recalled. ''I said, 'Well, you'll be the first.' ''

Drawing (Nancy Doniger)