MCPS is executing significant changes to special education that directly affect autistic students and their families.
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Anonymous
This is another great point. They unilaterally decided to make ESY 4 weeks in the summer, 4 days per week, for 3 hours per day. So in previous years it was 25 hours per week and now every child is stuck with only 12. ESY is again for the neediest kids who will experience significant regression in their skills if they don't receive special ed services in the summer. In my opinion this goes against special ed law as you can't have a one size fits all approach for ESY. Cutting services in half is criminal. I've heard from teachers that they also are forcing them to make all ESY decisions by March, which means moving all IEP meetings scheduled after that up. Imagine having to fit 3 months worth of meetings into a month while also trying to teach. I really hope if teams don't meet these deadlines that they won't use it as an excuse to deny kids access to ESY. It's also going to be really hard to staff ESY with that hours. Most teachers who do it are looking for a good summer job and these hours will not be enticing enough. |
Anonymous
The alternative is to send these kids to private placements where the district would then be spending millions of dollars in tuition. Does that seem like a reasonable solution? Smaller districts certainly do that because the population is small enough, but it's way more cost effective to meet these kids' needs here. I suspect that more parents will file and the costs will go up as the quality of the programs decline though. It's a consequence Taylor is not factoring in at all. |
Anonymous
The alternative is to take the fight to state house and congress in order to get the required funding. |
Anonymous
| Unpopular opinion from a parent of a student with Autism- I see students with autism who are working on alternative learning outcomes and a high school certificate in services that have a similar profile as autism services. I believe the autism specific service and specialist exploded in the county and got too specific for public education. Many families from all over the country moved here for these specific autism services and demands, staffing, and programs exploded to something unrealistic for a public school system. Students in self contained special education can benefit from the best practices offered and used in the autism specific programs. I believe the county got too specific, created too many individual set of services that are not realistic to maintain with the funding and staffing of a large public school system. |
Anonymous
Then your opinion is that no one should be able to serve these children. If one of the largest school systems in the country can't do it, who do you think is going to do it? |
Anonymous
This doesn't make sense to me. If you think more kids could benefit from the expertise of the autism programs then why is cutting their support the answer? This seems like a very Taylor response- everyone should get a piece of this special thing, so we'll spread it around until it isn't special or useful anymore! The different alternate learning outcomes programs do serve different profiles of kids. You may look at them and see they're all cognitively disabled but kids in LFI vs Autism learn very differently. |
Anonymous
| Actually, some kids already had their IEP meetings and have ESY for this summer written in. Schools are being told to contact families and change IEPs to reflect less time in ESY, which is illegal. We need a strong presence to fight this. |
Anonymous
Because there is not funding to support going deep in autism and still be able to deliver baseline basics for everything/everyone else. |
Anonymous
We need to fire the superintendent. |
Anonymous
| Agree. This Sup has blown everything up to what end? Certainly not an improvement |
Anonymous
Ah, and there the real answer is given away. Taylor and many people don't care about these kids, better to take away what little support they have so others get theirs. There certainly is enough funding if it is prioritized. And as stated by others before- it'll cost us more money in the end to not serve these kids appropriately. |
Anonymous
+1 not voting for any BOE member running for any office that doesn't move to get rid of his MAGA ahole. |
Anonymous
DP. Interesting take, here, when PP was suggesting basics for others. Really, whether shortage or plenty, there isn't much of an ethical basis for meeting the needs of one group better than another. That's not to say that, for this group, many might underestimate the relative level of need/costs of meeting that need with reasonable equivalence. |
Anonymous
This |
Anonymous
Nothing os changing on terms of real world support. There has never been enough funding for special needs students. No one has ever cared. Bare minimums have applied to meet the law. The only real change is that now you lnow that no one cares. |