Inside the great teacher resignation

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:More money would definitely prevent teachers from quitting, but I am not sure it would attract enough new teachers. Gen Z is more focused on quality of life and work/life balance in addition to enough money to pay for college loans. I am not sure teaching is a career that enough young people will aspire too.

-a teacher of 20 years

What if public colleges had programs where education majors paid reduced tuition? Could states have programs to attract new teachers where you sign up to teach in-state in exchange for loan forgiveness based on years of teaching?

Getting back to a PP's comment about co-teaching, assuming the pool of teachers increased, could co-teaching be a thing? When my kids were younger, I worked in a job-share position, and it provided great balance. It's better than working part-time because the days you aren't working are covered by someone else, so you don't have as much creep as with part-time work. The only potential problem is that job-share partners must be on the same page (mine was amazing!).

As to Gen Z and work-life balance, there aren't that many in the workforce yet. However, assuming that they build on Millenials' preference for work-life balance, teaching is just one of many professions that need to be reimagined.

[Anonymous]

Teacher here. I’d settle for just removing most of the BS crap we are expected to do that’s doesn’t involve teaching. All of these extras take a ton of time away from planning and grading. If my one planning periods is fine due to meetings, data entry, etc, that means I either don’t plan like I want to or stay up late planning. I don’t get paid enough to do work at home. All of these extras come from people who are not teachers. Teachers aren’t office workers who have all day to crunch numbers. We write and perform many plays each day. If I’m expected to attend meetings and enter data during my planning, my students suffer for it. I got zero grading done last week. All of my planning periods were taken up by meetings.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:I taught in self-contained rooms for ED kids for years and they do work. Kids are taught at their pace, learn to use self-control strategies, and are not in trouble all day. These kids that are so often in heightened states are damaging their brains, and the kids that have to witness it all day ate experiencing secondary trauma. A self-contained program is not for life. It’s a reset, time to heal and get in control. The ones in my county have incredibly low enrollment, because the bar is so high to move them now. It’s not juvenile detention. It’s meeting their needs, building success, and then determining scaffolded returns to gen ed.

Yes, but that’s not what’s being proposed in this thread. They want to move all of the kids that are significantly disruptive in gen ed classrooms into the self-contained classrooms. And then they only want to move them back out after they’ve been able to demonstrate self control in the self-contained setting, where we all know they’re not likely to provide the necessary and appropriate resources.

How do you think that would go?

Are you a teacher? If not, do you understand what you're expecting from classroom teachers? It is too much. That's why they're quitting. I know a young teacher whose nose was broken by a student 6 weeks before her wedding. Most teachers do not have the training and do not want to deal with those types of behaviors day in and day out.

As a parent of a child with special needs, few would understand as well as I. My kid is younger, but I can certainly imagine what it would be like to scale him up by 2x or 3x.

I would certainly agree that teachers need help with these students. But you’re not asking for help. You’re trying to hide those students away so you can forget about them.

No, I'm not. I posted above that I've tried to help students with significant special needs for years. I was a special ed teacher and later a school psychologist. I'm just stating the obvious -- that classroom teachers are leaving because they can't cope with the large number of students with significant behaviors, and many school districts don't have the resources to provide 1:1 paras. Another factor -- I would imagine that very few DCUM posters are encouraging their children to become teachers. We have a problem that can't be ignored and will be even worse when the current teachers aged 55+ retire.

You didn’t say what your plan is, except to apparently build more overpasses for the kids you’d like to leave behind to live under. Though, I imagine you’re at an age now where that doesn’t really matter to you.

Not true. I still work part-time. You're distorting my words, not sure if intentionally or just not understanding. My plan would be to hire more teachers and paras, with smaller classes; however, I don't control the funding and have no influence over the number of teachers leaving the profession.

Ok, but if you look further up in the thread, the proposal was to fast-track kids into self-contained classrooms if they disrupt gen-ed classrooms, and make them earn their way back. This would obviously grossly increase the number of kids in those programs. And with no hope of fully staffing those programs, those kids wouldn't have a realistic path to get out of there.

The idea that more self-contained classrooms is the answer here is ridiculous. Yes, there will always be some set of students where that really is the best environment for them. But it will always be a small number, and it needs to be a small number because we'd never be able to recruit enough staff to handle large numbers effectively. 1:1 aides obviously have their own challenges, but for those that actually need it, its going to be cheaper and easier for the school district to provide than it would be to provide them with a self-contained program of similar educational quality.

The problem is, school districts are taking the easy way out, choosing to spend their money on lawyers to fight parents, rather than actually staffing and improving their programs.

A one in one aide who is not allowed to touch a kid who is out of control may as well not be there. Frankly these kids are given free reign to run around the school while available staff “block the exits” they are out of control because no teacher is going to touch your throwing spitting biting kicking and hitting child when you will file a lawsuit if we do. So your kid runs around destroying the school until they “burn themselves out.” I don’t think you truly understand the manpower involved when a kid starts running around the school. If we could just take the child to a sensory or break room to calm down it would be helpful but no one is allowed to touch them to get them there so they run wild. We are too scared of lawsuits to touch your kid. It is mentally and physically exhausting to go to work everyday knowing a kid may abuse you or the children you are supposed to protect at any point during the day and your only recourse is to move out of the way and or take the blows.

How does moving those kids out of your class solve those problems for everyone but you?

I’m not the PP, but all of the other kids and their parents, as well as the teachers, will be much happier if they’re able to learn in a safe and relatively calm environment at school. Educational outcomes world improve dramatically for 95% of students (or at least stop declining) and teachers wouldn’t be leaving the profession so rapidly either. How is that not obvious?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Teacher here. I’d settle for just removing most of the BS crap we are expected to do that’s doesn’t involve teaching. All of these extras take a ton of time away from planning and grading. If my one planning periods is fine due to meetings, data entry, etc, that means I either don’t plan like I want to or stay up late planning. I don’t get paid enough to do work at home. All of these extras come from people who are not teachers. Teachers aren’t office workers who have all day to crunch numbers. We write and perform many plays each day. If I’m expected to attend meetings and enter data during my planning, my students suffer for it. I got zero grading done last week. All of my planning periods were taken up by meetings.

Could someone else do the data entry part of your job? Is there anything else that a non-teacher could help with?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:I taught in self-contained rooms for ED kids for years and they do work. Kids are taught at their pace, learn to use self-control strategies, and are not in trouble all day. These kids that are so often in heightened states are damaging their brains, and the kids that have to witness it all day ate experiencing secondary trauma. A self-contained program is not for life. It’s a reset, time to heal and get in control. The ones in my county have incredibly low enrollment, because the bar is so high to move them now. It’s not juvenile detention. It’s meeting their needs, building success, and then determining scaffolded returns to gen ed.

Yes, but that’s not what’s being proposed in this thread. They want to move all of the kids that are significantly disruptive in gen ed classrooms into the self-contained classrooms. And then they only want to move them back out after they’ve been able to demonstrate self control in the self-contained setting, where we all know they’re not likely to provide the necessary and appropriate resources.

How do you think that would go?

Are you a teacher? If not, do you understand what you're expecting from classroom teachers? It is too much. That's why they're quitting. I know a young teacher whose nose was broken by a student 6 weeks before her wedding. Most teachers do not have the training and do not want to deal with those types of behaviors day in and day out.

As a parent of a child with special needs, few would understand as well as I. My kid is younger, but I can certainly imagine what it would be like to scale him up by 2x or 3x.

I would certainly agree that teachers need help with these students. But you’re not asking for help. You’re trying to hide those students away so you can forget about them.

No, I'm not. I posted above that I've tried to help students with significant special needs for years. I was a special ed teacher and later a school psychologist. I'm just stating the obvious -- that classroom teachers are leaving because they can't cope with the large number of students with significant behaviors, and many school districts don't have the resources to provide 1:1 paras. Another factor -- I would imagine that very few DCUM posters are encouraging their children to become teachers. We have a problem that can't be ignored and will be even worse when the current teachers aged 55+ retire.

You didn’t say what your plan is, except to apparently build more overpasses for the kids you’d like to leave behind to live under. Though, I imagine you’re at an age now where that doesn’t really matter to you.

Not true. I still work part-time. You're distorting my words, not sure if intentionally or just not understanding. My plan would be to hire more teachers and paras, with smaller classes; however, I don't control the funding and have no influence over the number of teachers leaving the profession.

Ok, but if you look further up in the thread, the proposal was to fast-track kids into self-contained classrooms if they disrupt gen-ed classrooms, and make them earn their way back. This would obviously grossly increase the number of kids in those programs. And with no hope of fully staffing those programs, those kids wouldn't have a realistic path to get out of there.

The idea that more self-contained classrooms is the answer here is ridiculous. Yes, there will always be some set of students where that really is the best environment for them. But it will always be a small number, and it needs to be a small number because we'd never be able to recruit enough staff to handle large numbers effectively. 1:1 aides obviously have their own challenges, but for those that actually need it, its going to be cheaper and easier for the school district to provide than it would be to provide them with a self-contained program of similar educational quality.

The problem is, school districts are taking the easy way out, choosing to spend their money on lawyers to fight parents, rather than actually staffing and improving their programs.

A one in one aide who is not allowed to touch a kid who is out of control may as well not be there. Frankly these kids are given free reign to run around the school while available staff “block the exits” they are out of control because no teacher is going to touch your throwing spitting biting kicking and hitting child when you will file a lawsuit if we do. So your kid runs around destroying the school until they “burn themselves out.” I don’t think you truly understand the manpower involved when a kid starts running around the school. If we could just take the child to a sensory or break room to calm down it would be helpful but no one is allowed to touch them to get them there so they run wild. We are too scared of lawsuits to touch your kid. It is mentally and physically exhausting to go to work everyday knowing a kid may abuse you or the children you are supposed to protect at any point during the day and your only recourse is to move out of the way and or take the blows.

How does moving those kids out of your class solve those problems for everyone but you?

I’m not the PP, but all of the other kids and their parents, as well as the teachers, will be much happier if they’re able to learn in a safe and relatively calm environment at school. Educational outcomes world improve dramatically for 95% of students (or at least stop declining) and teachers wouldn’t be leaving the profession so rapidly either. How is that not obvious?

And the kids, teachers, and paras in the segregated classrooms? Screw ‘em?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:More money would definitely prevent teachers from quitting, but I am not sure it would attract enough new teachers. Gen Z is more focused on quality of life and work/life balance in addition to enough money to pay for college loans. I am not sure teaching is a career that enough young people will aspire too.

-a teacher of 20 years

Agreed. More money is probably necessary, particularly bumping starting wages, but certainly isn’t sufficient. Though, we could use different pay scales as a way to encourage more people already interested in education to go into critical shortage areas, like Special Education.

The work-life balance issue seems to be the big problem that needs to be addressed. At elementary, co-teaching really looks like a good option, accepting it will come at significant cost. And at higher levels, cutting back on the number of classes each teacher has to increase prep time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Byyeeee.

School is not childcare. We remember.

Sorry, I don’t care about that anymore.

Old news.

I want my kids taught by experience teachers. I don’t want to drive them away.

We all want our kids taught by skilled, reliable teachers. But then our teachers refused to come to work. They came back, but how long until their next temper tantrum?

Parents like you are why they aren't continuing to teach. They did work. Teaching virtually per the government's decision is working. You had the tantrum as you cannot handle your kids all day every day.

+1,000,000

[Anonymous]

One indicator of the current and future state of careers in education... how many DCUM parents have college age students or other family members studying to become teachers? This forum is filled with posters seeking or providing advice regarding students in need of special supports. Do you also view this field as a career option?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/opinion/teachers-quitting-education-crisis.html

Our region is prominently featured.
In separate new, running Josh Hawley is also introducing a bill in Congress that follows the Youngkin playbook in castigating schools and teachers.

Is this the same guy who supported the Jan 6 insurrectionists?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teacher here. I’d settle for just removing most of the BS crap we are expected to do that’s doesn’t involve teaching. All of these extras take a ton of time away from planning and grading. If my one planning periods is fine due to meetings, data entry, etc, that means I either don’t plan like I want to or stay up late planning. I don’t get paid enough to do work at home. All of these extras come from people who are not teachers. Teachers aren’t office workers who have all day to crunch numbers. We write and perform many plays each day. If I’m expected to attend meetings and enter data during my planning, my students suffer for it. I got zero grading done last week. All of my planning periods were taken up by meetings.

Could someone else do the data entry part of your job? Is there anything else that a non-teacher could help with?

Like who? Volunteers aren’t allowed to do it and they can’t even find enough subs to cover for absent teachers. I wish each grade level had a secretary and someone to do the endless testing so we could just teach.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I think that teachers, students, and parents would all be better off if discipline policies were changed to protect those in school buildings from the most disruptive students (who are a minority). Those truly disruptive, abusive, and unruly students take up too much time and emotional weight. Teachers should not have to suffer abuse at the hands of students, just as students should not lose out on their education due to serious disruptions by other students. Children need structure. By allowing this minority of students to have so much power, teachers are exhausted, and children learn that rules are optional. Parents, too, wind up in defense mode. Getting zeros for late or missing work seems excessive when other students can burst in and out of classrooms, throw items at teachers, and attack other kids at recess. Seriously. If you want discipline, then find a way to address the kids for whom conventional discipline strategies don't work.

What do you propose?

It's hard to imagine a path to implementing it, but I do think elementary rooms should have two teachers.

Teacher here proposing a few things:
1) There needs to be a way to "fast track" kids like this into a special education self contained classroom within a few weeks, not within a few years. If, with interventions, the child can learn to self regulate, then said kid returns to gen ed, with a full time, 1:1 aide. If they are successful with that support, then fade the TA out.
2) Every single K-1st grade room needs a certified teacher and either a full time TA or a co-teacher. OR, limit K-1 rooms to no more than 10 kids.
3) Pass legislation that requires insurance companies to provide for the educational needs of kids who need to be outplaced. This is primarily a health issue and then second, an education issue. Insurance companies DO YOUR JOB. And the government needs to build, staff, train and supply schools to deal with kids like this.

From your posts (at least, the posts I think come from you), you seem to be at breaking point. And as a parent of a child with special needs and behavioral challenges, I get how exhausting and painful (emotionally and physically) it can be. So I suspect your intentions are pure here. But I don't think you're really thinking through how this would play out for kids with special needs.

The reason we have IDEA to begin with is that states and local school districts were not providing appropriate educational services to kids with disabilities. And I get it-- it is expensive to do so. But essentially eliminating principle of Least Restrictive Environment would bring us right back to that. Kids would quickly get shuffled out to self-contained classrooms that would likely become even more short-staffed and resource poor. Once there, many kids would likely regress. Kids that might otherwise be successful in a gen ed classroom with an aid would never get that chance. Rather than giving kids the benefit of the doubt that they could be successful with supports, they'd instead have to prove themselves in an environment stacked against them. And much of the political pressure to provide resources for the needs of these students would disappear as quickly as the students would disappear into their segregated classrooms.

I don't think health insurance is the right funding path for a variety of reasons. For one, I hope we'll move to single-payer relatively soon anyway. But even more, it sets a bad precedent, would be complicated to regulate, and would likely pose serious challenges to low-income and/or underinsured families. We don't expect insurance companies to reimburse schools in order to make the environment accessible to kids with physical disabilities- why should developmental disabilities be different?

Developmental disabilities come in spectrums that are particularly hard to define and measure. I don't see how you could ever separate educational services that could be covered by the school from habilitative and support services covered by insurance. Any attempt to do so would likely result in battles between insurance companies and schools, where ultimately only the kids would lose. While there are some related challenges already in public schools related to this, at least public schools are arms of the government and ostensibly should have an interest in the public good. The same cannot be said for private insurance companies.

And this would likely get incredibly expensive, assuming these services would be billed like other habilitative services paid through insurance. Since my child was diagnosed with ASD as a toddler, we've simply accepted that we'd hit our out-of-pocket max every year, sometimes exceeding coverage limits and having to pay for things in full. It isn't easy financially, but we're able to do it. But while our income bracket may not be particularly high by DCUM standards, we're in a pretty high HHI percentile with good employer-subsidized health benefits. Not everyone is so lucky.

Every child -- those with special needs or not -- deserves the best we can give. Unfortunately, the number of students with special needs in public schools has increased substantially, along with parents who have very high expectations for services, correspondence updates, and paperwork; and they bring advocates and/or attorneys to meetings. I understand why that's being done, but the reality is that the typical school system across our country does not have the resources or personnel to provide that level of service. We are facing a crisis with too few teachers.

So, we should sacrifice the students with special needs for the benefit of the other students? I think you're starting from a place of good intentions, but there's a fine line between being burnt out and simply not caring.

Well, what if the special needs child is physically harming other students? Or if the special needs child throws materials and the other children need to clear the room fairly often? Just like with masking and other issues. We are having the problem of where does one individual’s rights end and another’s/greater good needs begin?

I don’t think there is an easy answer in some of these situations and it does deserved to be looked at from the perspective of BOTH the rights of the special needs child AND the rights of the other children in the class. Sped kids get advocates, but who is advocating for the general education student and how the sped child impacts their education?

THIS - ALL OF IT

Kids internalize a lot. People have no idea the fear that children go through.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:I taught in self-contained rooms for ED kids for years and they do work. Kids are taught at their pace, learn to use self-control strategies, and are not in trouble all day. These kids that are so often in heightened states are damaging their brains, and the kids that have to witness it all day ate experiencing secondary trauma. A self-contained program is not for life. It’s a reset, time to heal and get in control. The ones in my county have incredibly low enrollment, because the bar is so high to move them now. It’s not juvenile detention. It’s meeting their needs, building success, and then determining scaffolded returns to gen ed.

Yes, but that’s not what’s being proposed in this thread. They want to move all of the kids that are significantly disruptive in gen ed classrooms into the self-contained classrooms. And then they only want to move them back out after they’ve been able to demonstrate self control in the self-contained setting, where we all know they’re not likely to provide the necessary and appropriate resources.

How do you think that would go?

Are you a teacher? If not, do you understand what you're expecting from classroom teachers? It is too much. That's why they're quitting. I know a young teacher whose nose was broken by a student 6 weeks before her wedding. Most teachers do not have the training and do not want to deal with those types of behaviors day in and day out.

As a parent of a child with special needs, few would understand as well as I. My kid is younger, but I can certainly imagine what it would be like to scale him up by 2x or 3x.

I would certainly agree that teachers need help with these students. But you’re not asking for help. You’re trying to hide those students away so you can forget about them.

No, I'm not. I posted above that I've tried to help students with significant special needs for years. I was a special ed teacher and later a school psychologist. I'm just stating the obvious -- that classroom teachers are leaving because they can't cope with the large number of students with significant behaviors, and many school districts don't have the resources to provide 1:1 paras. Another factor -- I would imagine that very few DCUM posters are encouraging their children to become teachers. We have a problem that can't be ignored and will be even worse when the current teachers aged 55+ retire.

You didn’t say what your plan is, except to apparently build more overpasses for the kids you’d like to leave behind to live under. Though, I imagine you’re at an age now where that doesn’t really matter to you.

Not true. I still work part-time. You're distorting my words, not sure if intentionally or just not understanding. My plan would be to hire more teachers and paras, with smaller classes; however, I don't control the funding and have no influence over the number of teachers leaving the profession.

Ok, but if you look further up in the thread, the proposal was to fast-track kids into self-contained classrooms if they disrupt gen-ed classrooms, and make them earn their way back. This would obviously grossly increase the number of kids in those programs. And with no hope of fully staffing those programs, those kids wouldn't have a realistic path to get out of there.

The idea that more self-contained classrooms is the answer here is ridiculous. Yes, there will always be some set of students where that really is the best environment for them. But it will always be a small number, and it needs to be a small number because we'd never be able to recruit enough staff to handle large numbers effectively. 1:1 aides obviously have their own challenges, but for those that actually need it, its going to be cheaper and easier for the school district to provide than it would be to provide them with a self-contained program of similar educational quality.

The problem is, school districts are taking the easy way out, choosing to spend their money on lawyers to fight parents, rather than actually staffing and improving their programs.

A one in one aide who is not allowed to touch a kid who is out of control may as well not be there. Frankly these kids are given free reign to run around the school while available staff “block the exits” they are out of control because no teacher is going to touch your throwing spitting biting kicking and hitting child when you will file a lawsuit if we do. So your kid runs around destroying the school until they “burn themselves out.” I don’t think you truly understand the manpower involved when a kid starts running around the school. If we could just take the child to a sensory or break room to calm down it would be helpful but no one is allowed to touch them to get them there so they run wild. We are too scared of lawsuits to touch your kid. It is mentally and physically exhausting to go to work everyday knowing a kid may abuse you or the children you are supposed to protect at any point during the day and your only recourse is to move out of the way and or take the blows.

How does moving those kids out of your class solve those problems for everyone but you?

I’m not the PP, but all of the other kids and their parents, as well as the teachers, will be much happier if they’re able to learn in a safe and relatively calm environment at school. Educational outcomes world improve dramatically for 95% of students (or at least stop declining) and teachers wouldn’t be leaving the profession so rapidly either. How is that not obvious?

And the kids, teachers, and paras in the segregated classrooms? Screw ‘em?

Well the kids in that classroom are all disruptive so yeah, they will just need to deal with the disruptions from the other kids. As for the teachers and staff, of course they should receive different training to keep them safe, a higher salary for the worse conditions, and/or lowered expectations for reporting and other admin since they’ll need to spend more time on classroom management. Also of course these rooms would have a higher staff/student ratio with shared aides.

And 95% of kids (and teachers!) will no longer be sacrificed and we might be able to save what’s left of our public education system.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teacher here. I’d settle for just removing most of the BS crap we are expected to do that’s doesn’t involve teaching. All of these extras take a ton of time away from planning and grading. If my one planning periods is fine due to meetings, data entry, etc, that means I either don’t plan like I want to or stay up late planning. I don’t get paid enough to do work at home. All of these extras come from people who are not teachers. Teachers aren’t office workers who have all day to crunch numbers. We write and perform many plays each day. If I’m expected to attend meetings and enter data during my planning, my students suffer for it. I got zero grading done last week. All of my planning periods were taken up by meetings.

Could someone else do the data entry part of your job? Is there anything else that a non-teacher could help with?

Like who? Volunteers aren’t allowed to do it and they can’t even find enough subs to cover for absent teachers. I wish each grade level had a secretary and someone to do the endless testing so we could just teach.

I'm just brainstorming. Maybe they need to let volunteers to it. Maybe its some tasks could be addressed through internship programs? More people would be willing to take on administrative jobs than work in a classroom.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:I taught in self-contained rooms for ED kids for years and they do work. Kids are taught at their pace, learn to use self-control strategies, and are not in trouble all day. These kids that are so often in heightened states are damaging their brains, and the kids that have to witness it all day ate experiencing secondary trauma. A self-contained program is not for life. It’s a reset, time to heal and get in control. The ones in my county have incredibly low enrollment, because the bar is so high to move them now. It’s not juvenile detention. It’s meeting their needs, building success, and then determining scaffolded returns to gen ed.

Yes, but that’s not what’s being proposed in this thread. They want to move all of the kids that are significantly disruptive in gen ed classrooms into the self-contained classrooms. And then they only want to move them back out after they’ve been able to demonstrate self control in the self-contained setting, where we all know they’re not likely to provide the necessary and appropriate resources.

How do you think that would go?

Are you a teacher? If not, do you understand what you're expecting from classroom teachers? It is too much. That's why they're quitting. I know a young teacher whose nose was broken by a student 6 weeks before her wedding. Most teachers do not have the training and do not want to deal with those types of behaviors day in and day out.

As a parent of a child with special needs, few would understand as well as I. My kid is younger, but I can certainly imagine what it would be like to scale him up by 2x or 3x.

I would certainly agree that teachers need help with these students. But you’re not asking for help. You’re trying to hide those students away so you can forget about them.

No, I'm not. I posted above that I've tried to help students with significant special needs for years. I was a special ed teacher and later a school psychologist. I'm just stating the obvious -- that classroom teachers are leaving because they can't cope with the large number of students with significant behaviors, and many school districts don't have the resources to provide 1:1 paras. Another factor -- I would imagine that very few DCUM posters are encouraging their children to become teachers. We have a problem that can't be ignored and will be even worse when the current teachers aged 55+ retire.

You didn’t say what your plan is, except to apparently build more overpasses for the kids you’d like to leave behind to live under. Though, I imagine you’re at an age now where that doesn’t really matter to you.

Not true. I still work part-time. You're distorting my words, not sure if intentionally or just not understanding. My plan would be to hire more teachers and paras, with smaller classes; however, I don't control the funding and have no influence over the number of teachers leaving the profession.

Ok, but if you look further up in the thread, the proposal was to fast-track kids into self-contained classrooms if they disrupt gen-ed classrooms, and make them earn their way back. This would obviously grossly increase the number of kids in those programs. And with no hope of fully staffing those programs, those kids wouldn't have a realistic path to get out of there.

The idea that more self-contained classrooms is the answer here is ridiculous. Yes, there will always be some set of students where that really is the best environment for them. But it will always be a small number, and it needs to be a small number because we'd never be able to recruit enough staff to handle large numbers effectively. 1:1 aides obviously have their own challenges, but for those that actually need it, its going to be cheaper and easier for the school district to provide than it would be to provide them with a self-contained program of similar educational quality.

The problem is, school districts are taking the easy way out, choosing to spend their money on lawyers to fight parents, rather than actually staffing and improving their programs.

A one in one aide who is not allowed to touch a kid who is out of control may as well not be there. Frankly these kids are given free reign to run around the school while available staff “block the exits” they are out of control because no teacher is going to touch your throwing spitting biting kicking and hitting child when you will file a lawsuit if we do. So your kid runs around destroying the school until they “burn themselves out.” I don’t think you truly understand the manpower involved when a kid starts running around the school. If we could just take the child to a sensory or break room to calm down it would be helpful but no one is allowed to touch them to get them there so they run wild. We are too scared of lawsuits to touch your kid. It is mentally and physically exhausting to go to work everyday knowing a kid may abuse you or the children you are supposed to protect at any point during the day and your only recourse is to move out of the way and or take the blows.

How does moving those kids out of your class solve those problems for everyone but you?

I’m not the PP, but all of the other kids and their parents, as well as the teachers, will be much happier if they’re able to learn in a safe and relatively calm environment at school. Educational outcomes world improve dramatically for 95% of students (or at least stop declining) and teachers wouldn’t be leaving the profession so rapidly either. How is that not obvious?

And the kids, teachers, and paras in the segregated classrooms? Screw ‘em?

Yep. They don't want to learn anyway.

I got to see it firsthand last week when parents were invited to my DD's classroom for their big presentations they've been working on since shortly after school started. This kid, the same kid who has issues weekly and causes classroom evacuations, had a meltdown because he wanted to hold the little clicker that controlled the classroom lights (and maybe smartboard?). His mom was there and her solution was "well, can he just hold it? It'll make him stop." He turned so mean and violent when told no. He kicked over his desk and started screaming at the teacher that she was stupid.

I would have been mortified if that was my kid. He may have some learning issues but so did my brother and cousin and they never did what these kids are allowed to do.

Getting notices from the teacher when the incidents happen and hearing about it from my kid is different than seeing it in person. We're thinking of pulling her at Christmas and enrolling her in our local Catholic school. They have space and when I enquired earlier this week, they said they have a small handful of students starting mid-year so DD wouldn't be the sole new kid.

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Anonymous wrote:I think that teachers, students, and parents would all be better off if discipline policies were changed to protect those in school buildings from the most disruptive students (who are a minority). Those truly disruptive, abusive, and unruly students take up too much time and emotional weight. Teachers should not have to suffer abuse at the hands of students, just as students should not lose out on their education due to serious disruptions by other students. Children need structure. By allowing this minority of students to have so much power, teachers are exhausted, and children learn that rules are optional. Parents, too, wind up in defense mode. Getting zeros for late or missing work seems excessive when other students can burst in and out of classrooms, throw items at teachers, and attack other kids at recess. Seriously. If you want discipline, then find a way to address the kids for whom conventional discipline strategies don't work.

What do you propose?

It's hard to imagine a path to implementing it, but I do think elementary rooms should have two teachers.

Teacher here proposing a few things:
1) There needs to be a way to "fast track" kids like this into a special education self contained classroom within a few weeks, not within a few years. If, with interventions, the child can learn to self regulate, then said kid returns to gen ed, with a full time, 1:1 aide. If they are successful with that support, then fade the TA out.
2) Every single K-1st grade room needs a certified teacher and either a full time TA or a co-teacher. OR, limit K-1 rooms to no more than 10 kids.
3) Pass legislation that requires insurance companies to provide for the educational needs of kids who need to be outplaced. This is primarily a health issue and then second, an education issue. Insurance companies DO YOUR JOB. And the government needs to build, staff, train and supply schools to deal with kids like this.

From your posts (at least, the posts I think come from you), you seem to be at breaking point. And as a parent of a child with special needs and behavioral challenges, I get how exhausting and painful (emotionally and physically) it can be. So I suspect your intentions are pure here. But I don't think you're really thinking through how this would play out for kids with special needs.

The reason we have IDEA to begin with is that states and local school districts were not providing appropriate educational services to kids with disabilities. And I get it-- it is expensive to do so. But essentially eliminating principle of Least Restrictive Environment would bring us right back to that. Kids would quickly get shuffled out to self-contained classrooms that would likely become even more short-staffed and resource poor. Once there, many kids would likely regress. Kids that might otherwise be successful in a gen ed classroom with an aid would never get that chance. Rather than giving kids the benefit of the doubt that they could be successful with supports, they'd instead have to prove themselves in an environment stacked against them. And much of the political pressure to provide resources for the needs of these students would disappear as quickly as the students would disappear into their segregated classrooms.

I don't think health insurance is the right funding path for a variety of reasons. For one, I hope we'll move to single-payer relatively soon anyway. But even more, it sets a bad precedent, would be complicated to regulate, and would likely pose serious challenges to low-income and/or underinsured families. We don't expect insurance companies to reimburse schools in order to make the environment accessible to kids with physical disabilities- why should developmental disabilities be different?

Developmental disabilities come in spectrums that are particularly hard to define and measure. I don't see how you could ever separate educational services that could be covered by the school from habilitative and support services covered by insurance. Any attempt to do so would likely result in battles between insurance companies and schools, where ultimately only the kids would lose. While there are some related challenges already in public schools related to this, at least public schools are arms of the government and ostensibly should have an interest in the public good. The same cannot be said for private insurance companies.

And this would likely get incredibly expensive, assuming these services would be billed like other habilitative services paid through insurance. Since my child was diagnosed with ASD as a toddler, we've simply accepted that we'd hit our out-of-pocket max every year, sometimes exceeding coverage limits and having to pay for things in full. It isn't easy financially, but we're able to do it. But while our income bracket may not be particularly high by DCUM standards, we're in a pretty high HHI percentile with good employer-subsidized health benefits. Not everyone is so lucky.

Every child -- those with special needs or not -- deserves the best we can give. Unfortunately, the number of students with special needs in public schools has increased substantially, along with parents who have very high expectations for services, correspondence updates, and paperwork; and they bring advocates and/or attorneys to meetings. I understand why that's being done, but the reality is that the typical school system across our country does not have the resources or personnel to provide that level of service. We are facing a crisis with too few teachers.

So, we should sacrifice the students with special needs for the benefit of the other students? I think you're starting from a place of good intentions, but there's a fine line between being burnt out and simply not caring.

Well, what if the special needs child is physically harming other students? Or if the special needs child throws materials and the other children need to clear the room fairly often? Just like with masking and other issues. We are having the problem of where does one individual’s rights end and another’s/greater good needs begin?

I don’t think there is an easy answer in some of these situations and it does deserved to be looked at from the perspective of BOTH the rights of the special needs child AND the rights of the other children in the class. Sped kids get advocates, but who is advocating for the general education student and how the sped child impacts their education?

THIS - ALL OF IT

Kids internalize a lot. People have no idea the fear that children go through.

100%. Also, this contributes to the lack of respect for adults in education. Why should a kid get punished for not handing in homework when another kid is hitting and pushing other students on a regular basis? Structure and stability matter. Chaos hurts everyone.