I belong to an online twins site. One of our forums is entitled :Here in Holland.” It’s a forum for those of us who have children with special needs of any sort. I always perused the forum to see what was going on with my TCO friends who frequent the forum.

As of Tuesday, I am officially a part of that forum. We had Ryan’s official IEP meeting on Tuesday. He’s been getting both speech and what they call special services. The special services he has been receiving is simply a special education teacher coming in 3-4 times a week to help teach him strategies to cope with certain situations that may arise. She also tries to help him stay organized. They have been pulling back the services from the special ed teacher in an effort to see if he can function without her in the classroom. The goal is to arm him with the tools he needs (things like check lists, which he does great with!) and see how he does implementing them on his own. So far so good. If he can function with these tools and no support, he won’t need that support over at the elementary school next year. If we find, in the next couple of months that he needs the services again, they will be put into his IEP in May. Right now, though, he’s been classified as a student with a speech and language impairment. There were several times during the meeting that I wanted to break into tears. Not because anything bad was said, but because they had such praise for Ryan and the progress he’s made since they did his intake eval last Jan. It was so heartwarming to hear all the wonderful things they had to say about him (Zach, too!) and about us. I honestly can not thank any of those people enough for what they have done for him. It has been a difference we’ve seen here at home, too, not just in school.

Our next meeting will be in May, over at the elementary school. That way, his teacher, speech therapist, etc can meet with the incoming people who will take over. I think, at that point, I’m going to ask for those special service to help him in his transition. He is very apprehensive about leaving his teacher and his classmates, all of whom he’s been with since we moved here last January. I’ve been trying to hype up how great 3rd grade will be: they get their own lockers, he’ll make new friends (he’s good at making friends), etc. He’s just such a creature of habit, and thrives on routine, and doesn’t like change that I can see how he’d be a bit scared.

I wanted to share a poem with you all.

Welcome To Holland
By Emily Perl Kingsley

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability-
to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience,
to understand it,
to imagine how it would feel.
It’s like this….

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip-
to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans..
The Coliseum.
The Michelangelo David.
The gondolas in Venice.
You may learn some handy phrases in Italian.
It’s all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off
you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says,
“Welcome to Holland.”

“Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”

But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease.
It’s just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around… and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills…and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy…and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say, “Yes, that’s where I was suppose to go. That’s what I had planned.”

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away…because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss.
But…if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things …
about Holland.

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Family, The Family, life, school, the kids | 1 Comment »

(Originally posted Saturday. I bumped the timestamp up so this would cycle through Erie Blogs’ blog roll.)

Today I heard about not one, but 2 teachers who decided it would be a good idea to berate 5 year old kindergarteners in front of their classmates. My initial reaction was WTH??? After reading the stories, my reaction was again, WTH???? What are these teachers thinking? By now, you all know that education is near and dear to my heart. I have taught before, and I’m returning to college this fall to complete my teaching degree to be able to teach here in NY state. So, forgive me for getting a bit fired up over these two stories. It takes a lot to stir me up, but stories like these are quick to do it.

One story from ABC News was about a New Albany, IN teacher caught on tape berating a kindergarten student, calling him ‘Ignorant, Pathetic, Self-Absorbed.’ I have been trying to figure out what on earth would possess a teacher to say these things to a 5 year old! He has no idea what those things mean, other than that they are bad (and probably only because of the tone of voice in which she said them). He was so beat down by this teacher that he told his parents that other kids didn’t like him because he was “bad and stupid.”

“Something needs to be done because you are pathetic! If me saying these words to you hurt, I hope it does because you’re hurting everyone else around you.”

He’s pathetic? I think, Ms. Woodward, that you are the pathetic one! This next quote is unconscionable to me!

“So you guys think, is that somebody you want to be with?” Woodward asks the class.

In unison, the other students reply, “Noooo.”

“See, your friend doesn’t want to be with you. I don’t know what else to tell you. So you’re not going to have friends because of your actions.”

You don’t tell a 5 year old that his friends don’t want to be with him because of his actions! They don’t understand that sort of thing! And btw, way to word the question to get the response that you wanted from the class, Ms. Woodward.

There are several problems with this story. The first is that there is an obvious lack of communication between this teacher and the parents. There are reportedly weekly progress reports for the students and frequent meetings with parents and teachers. If this student was such a problem, why, then, weren’t his weekly progress reports showing that? Why wasn’t anything talked about in the parent/teacher meetings? It is apparent that his progress reports had bother smiley faces and frown faces depicting both good areas and areas needing improvement, but what is not clear are the steps taken to improve the problem areas.

Two weeks after the start of school, his teacher talked to his parents about setting up a behavior plan, but when the parents approached the teacher later to start that process rolling, Ms. Woodward reportedly said she didn’t have time for that. She didn’t have time? She didn’t have time to help him at the start of the school year, so she should have no time to berate him at the end of the school year, either. You can’t possibly expect me to believe that, when you had the opportunity to help change his behavior (commonly referred to in the Special Ed. field as behavior modification) and you declined to do that, that you then want sympathy for putting up with what you describe as “rolling around, punching, biting, kicking” all year long. Why did the teacher not talk to the parents about it? Why did she not refer the student to services within the school, such as the Special Ed teacher or a counselor? Why was the principal not informed of said bad behavior? If no one was listening (in the event that she did tell people within the school) then why did she not tell her union rep? I am no fan of unions, especially teachers unions, but that’s precisely the reason they are there. To help stop teachers from getting into this exact situation. But you can’t stand up for the teacher after the fact and say that she had no other recourse and that’s why she had to stoop to this level. It’s completely unacceptable.

The other story that really got my blood boiling was this one:

Florida Teacher Allegedly Lets Kindergarteners Kick Autistic Boy Out of Class in ‘Survivor’-Like Vote

Are you kidding me? I could paraphrase it, but I’d rather you read it in toto. Here’s the link from Fox News. Here’s an excerpt:

Barton claims that Alex was punished for symptoms of his disability, such as humming and eating his homework. She says Portillo went too far last week when she kicked Alex out of class, and then allowed the other students to vote on whether he should be allowed back in.

Each student was also allowed to say what he or she did not like about Alex. By a 14-to-2 margin, the students voted Alex out of class, according to The South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

“She said this was her way of correcting his behavior,” Barton said. “I asked him how that made him feel and he said, ‘I feel sad.’”

What makes this worse is that this child has Asperger’s Syndrome, a high functioning form of Autism. This teacher punished this student for having a disability!!! I mean, really, we hear and talk about all kinds of race and sex discrimination, but rarely does anyone talk about this kind of discrimination. What did a 5 year old Autistic child do to deserve to be “voted” out of his classroom by, essentially, his teacher? I don’t blame his peers, btw. I place the blame directly on the teacher. Set aside the fact that what she did was AGAINST THE LAW. What’s more important is what she has taught the other 16 students in the class. She has taught them to be prejudiced. Plain and simple. Instead of teaching those students to embrace our differences she has taught them that it’s ok to exclude someone because they are different. When most schools are trying to be inclusive, that is, trying to include special needs students in general education classrooms whenever appropriate (thank you IDEA!), this teacher is taking it upon herself to laugh in the face of such an idea.

Honestly, it’s teachers like these that, over the last 7 years, have caused me to change the focus of my degree. I want to teach, more than anything, and I will. But my major is now PoliSci in an effort to get into advocacy. These children don’t deserve to be treated the way these teachers treated them. I am also a big advocate for collegiate education departments to overhaul their teaching programs to require general education teachers, for any grade level, to take AT LEAST 3 special needs courses. One would cover MIMH (Mildly Mentally Handicapped), which would cover mild learning disabilities such as dyslexia, etc. One would cover MOMH (Moderately Mentally Handicapped). The other would cover S/P (Severe and Profound). Now, ultimately, most general education teachers won’t have too much interaction with S/P students. Most of the time they are in self-contained classrooms because they require many more services than can be accommodated for in a gen ed classroom. But, it’s still important for them to understand what these students go through on a day-to-day basis.

I really think that if these teachers had been better educated, they would not have reacted the way that they did. It is obvious that neither of these teachers has any kind of knowledge regarding special needs. And while the first student may not have been diagnosed with anything, the teacher obviously did not recognize any sort of warning signs, if you will, that may have led to an intervention earlier in the school year, thus preventing the eventual outcome.

We are currently going through the diagnosis stage with our boys and I must say that, while I have a pretty good background in a lot of it, it’s still very eye-opening. I think we are fortunate in that I know the signs and symptoms when a lot of parents don’t. It certainly helps, but it isn’t fool proof. We are so incredibly lucky to have the boys in the school system that we do. Their support systems are fantastic and they have really worked with the boys over the last 4 months to do what needs to be done and get them the services that they need. It is really phenomenal to me how well equipped this school system is to handle special needs. Their school has a school psychologist all their own…well, he may also work with the elementary school (the boys attend a primary school). I just love how the classrooms are set up and the fact that they do intake evaluations to figure out which classroom a student is best suited for, which I think is a fantastic idea! Anyway, I just have to say that I am thankful that we are in a district where the teachers are well informed and more than willing to do what it takes to see their students succeed. I only wish every school had teachers like ours. Perhaps then we wouldn’t have stories like these.

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News, education | 1 Comment »