Inside the great teacher resignation

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

I honestly think some of the other kids likely end up with PTSD from the experience of sharing a classroom (especially if their desk is nearby) with an out of control kid. It would be always walking on eggshells waiting for the explosion like living with an abusive parent at home. We should be protecting our children. People can see why active shooter training is traumatic for kids but they think it’s fine that Larlo explodes nearby without warning and then you need to evacuate the classroom and let him destroy your things and your work? It’s honestly shameful that we allow this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Tell me you don’t have a kid with autism without telling me you don’t have a kid with autism.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Why not use the substantial resources you’re referencing to actually support students and teachers in the LRE?

It’s because you know the schools wouldn’t properly staff the special education programs. It’s pretty clear from the tone of your post that you’re not interesting in helping those kids- you’re just trying to get rid of them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

I honestly think some of the other kids likely end up with PTSD from the experience of sharing a classroom (especially if their desk is nearby) with an out of control kid. It would be always walking on eggshells waiting for the explosion like living with an abusive parent at home. We should be protecting our children. People can see why active shooter training is traumatic for kids but they think it’s fine that Larlo explodes nearby without warning and then you need to evacuate the classroom and let him destroy your things and your work? It’s honestly shameful that we allow this.

When my kids were in elementary school, one kid caused five students to change classes, one student to transfer to a different school after relentless physical and verbal bullying, and a teacher to take long term leave after the kid tripped her. In addition, the kid caused a host of misery for everyone else. My own child asked if he could spend recess in the office to avoid being outside with this bully. We need to consider the mental health consequences of trying to learn in this type of environment.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: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?

Well, my dyslexic/ gifted high school kid wants to be a teacher, primarily because she has had a few amazing tutors over the years. But she won’t teach in public schools because they don’t care about kids like her and they also don’t stop the rampant sexual harassment she is experiencing. We’ll see where this goes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Why not use the substantial resources you’re referencing to actually support students and teachers in the LRE?

It’s because you know the schools wouldn’t properly staff the special education programs. It’s pretty clear from the tone of your post that you’re not interesting in helping those kids- you’re just trying to get rid of them.

2 reasons. First, because we can spend even more money and then the other kids are STILL affected by this trauma in their classrooms. Even if the violence or disruption is reduced, it’s still not acceptable. And second, because these things are getting worse. The kids are getting more and more dangerous and the number of the kids with behavioral problems are increasing every year. We need to start addressing the problem in a safer, more scalable way.

And yes, these changes will be for the benefit of the teachers and the other kids.

[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.

I’m turning in my retirement notice after Thanksgiving. I’ll retire 3 years earlier than I had planned a few years ago. I just stress too much over all that is expected that I don’t get done. Just planning for one day:
*Morning Meeting
*Math (Number sense lesson, focus lesson, stations, small group while trying to manage behaviors of those not in the group)
*Intervention block (Intervention group and managing behaviors of those not in the group. By the end of this block some students have spent 50 minutes straight hopefully working independently while I’m with groups.)
*Word study
*Reading (Focus lesson, small groups)
*Writing (Focus lesson, hold writing conferences)
*Science or social studies

A minimum of 2/5 of our planning time is spent in meetings each week which seldom results in any accomplished planning. I’m literally planning next day details at night. Who needs phonics work? Who needs phonemic awareness? Which students need practice with number and operations skills? Which lessons and materials do I need for those groups? Where do I find those lessons and materials? What is my plan for the 3 students having difficulty self regulating? What is my plan to support the students who are most affected by the students having difficulty managing their behaviors? What are my plans to support all of the various academic needs that they are perceived to have based on the screeners? How can I better manage the 20 students while they are not with me in small group? That pile of papers sitting on my floor at home? I’ll get to those later (rinse and repeat). I need to remember to do the assigned online trainings at some point.

Add in conferences at the beginning of the year and end of first quarter, staff meetings, in-person PD, emails, and any other number of tasks.

[Anonymous]

09:48 here. I said 3, but there are definitely more than 3 disruptive students in the classroom.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't know why people keep talking about the effect of COVID. This thread is about why teachers are resigning.

I'm an elementary school teacher. I know three teachers who resigned last year, a few years earlier than they had anticipated. Last year was an exceptionally hard year, it is true. We had so many teacher absences, and were constantly covering for teachers who were out and had no subs. This year it is even harder. We still have a lot of teacher vacancies; in addition we have a large number of brand new teachers, or conditional teachers without formal teacher training and student teaching. They can do OK for a while, but they really need mentors; yet the mentor teacher support isn't there because most of those teachers have been moved back into the classroom themselves.

Meanwhile, our school district is going like gangbusters with the next new big thing. They do NOT understand how tapped out we all are. More and more teachers are leaving or planning to leave.

The ONE thing that the school district could do, to retain experienced teachers, IMO is just to calm the eff down. Just let it be OK for us to be competent. Everything doesn't have to be bright and shiny and amazing. And beef up HR however you need to hire more teachers. Retrain administrators who are experiencing staff attrition. When `10% of your teaching staff resigns, that's a sign you have a poor administrator. Look at the principals who have managed to retain their experienced staff and ask "What is he doing, that other principals aren't doing?" And then train your administrators to do those things.

Are you referring to the switch away from Lucy Caulkins' Readers and Writers workshop? That change had to happen. Leaving that curriculum in place would be negligent given what is known. It had to go and should have never happened.

HAHAHAHAHA- god no. Most teachers hated that anyway.

That is small potatoes compared to the exit tickets, bulletin board mandates, showing growth every week for objectives that are year long ones, explaining repeatedly why a child who has never spoken English doesn't understand the latest test, testing for _______, progress monitoring for each objective (even tho the kid doesn't speak English), making sure kids are using sentence stems, turning on the right video for the next segment, checking lexia status and minutes per child, managing dreambox, and providing IEP updates, monitoring all the standards on the report card on the same google document and reporting out monthly on the standard during the data meeting, unpacking the latest standard and mapping the bought curriculum to the standard AGAIN even though the district already did this.

There is so much you don't understand that doesn't boil down to Lucy Caulkins. It is like all parents know how to say is Lucy Caulkins because they are listening to the next education podcast.

Look, my daughter's school decided not to role out the school-distrivt purchased replacement curriculum to Lucy Caulkin's this year because the principal decided it was "too much change" post-pandemic. My daughter's teacher promises that she's supplementing readers and writers workshop with phonics, but my confidence level that they're not teaching methods that should be thrown out is very low. I'm having to teach my first grader phonics at home. It's a real issue.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

As mad as some of the posts make me in this thread, where several people seem to be explicitly or implicitly proposing that we sacrifice children with special needs, I certainly do recognize the very real and very serious challenges faced by schools, teachers, and kids. This isn't the only example, but it is one that I've long thought about.

My younger kid has autism, but generally doesn't require much in the way of supports. He has long had increased behavioral issues compared to his peers, although luckily they've gotten better over time. When he started his 4 year-old preschool class, his teacher (with our blessing) basically created a little unit on autism for the kids. At that age, there wasn't a stigma attached to it for my son or the other kids in the class- to them, they were just learning about each other. It normalized it. I know there are confidentiality policies and laws in place that complicate that sort of thing in public schools. And while I understand the need to tread carefully, I think we should generally be willing to be more open to having those kinds of discussions and lessons.

Separately, I think we've gone overboard with concerns over physical interventions. I get why, and I get that it is complicated, but I still think we've gone overboard. My kids have gotten hurt a number of times at preschool and school. Nothing too serious- the worst things just requiring stitches, which have been quite rare. When those cases happen, I can hear and see the fear/worry in the school staff when they talk to me about it. They seem to calm down rather quickly when it's clear I'm not mad at any of them, but it makes me think they've had some bad experiences with parents. So I get why they'd be reluctant to do physical interventions. And I get how it becomes particularly challenging and dangerous to do them as the kids get bigger and stronger. But, when possible/appropriate, and when there are staff capable of handling the students, I am completely fine with physical interventions. And I understand that means some kids would likely get hurt in the course of those interventions, just like some kids would get hurt without them.

We should all be more understanding and less litigious. I really don't think it's hard to determine when someone is acting in good faith, even when mistakes are made or accidents happen.

I don't have a good feeling for whether parents of children with special needs really want these strong notions of confidentiality practiced, or how litigious/angry they get over physical interventions and injuries. I would expect it to be a very small number, but I very well could be grossly misunderstanding that (particularly in the DMV, where everyone seems more uptight than where I grew up in the midwest).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Why not use the substantial resources you’re referencing to actually support students and teachers in the LRE?

It’s because you know the schools wouldn’t properly staff the special education programs. It’s pretty clear from the tone of your post that you’re not interesting in helping those kids- you’re just trying to get rid of them.

2 reasons. First, because we can spend even more money and then the other kids are STILL affected by this trauma in their classrooms. Even if the violence or disruption is reduced, it’s still not acceptable. And second, because these things are getting worse. The kids are getting more and more dangerous and the number of the kids with behavioral problems are increasing every year. We need to start addressing the problem in a safer, more scalable way.

And yes, these changes will be for the benefit of the teachers and the other kids.

But it sounds like you're saying it is acceptable if that "violence or disruption" is experienced by the kids with special needs-- just so long as your kids are protected from having to see it.

[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

true

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

I honestly think some of the other kids likely end up with PTSD from the experience of sharing a classroom (especially if their desk is nearby) with an out of control kid. It would be always walking on eggshells waiting for the explosion like living with an abusive parent at home. We should be protecting our children. People can see why active shooter training is traumatic for kids but they think it’s fine that Larlo explodes nearby without warning and then you need to evacuate the classroom and let him destroy your things and your work? It’s honestly shameful that we allow this.

When my kids were in elementary school, one kid caused five students to change classes, one student to transfer to a different school after relentless physical and verbal bullying, and a teacher to take long term leave after the kid tripped her. In addition, the kid caused a host of misery for everyone else. My own child asked if he could spend recess in the office to avoid being outside with this bully. We need to consider the mental health consequences of trying to learn in this type of environment.

You're casting an extremely wide net if you're now including childhood bullies in the set of kids you'd like to segregate into different schools/classrooms. I'm not saying there isn't a problem to address there, but you seem to have unrealistic expectations and ideas.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Tell me you don’t have a kid with autism without telling me you don’t have a kid with autism.

My kid has autism and still doesn’t do this. My kid is the one traumatized when kids with behavioral issues trash the classroom. But I have a non-autistic brother with ODD who did. So sick of autism being blamed for everything.

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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.

I honestly think some of the other kids likely end up with PTSD from the experience of sharing a classroom (especially if their desk is nearby) with an out of control kid. It would be always walking on eggshells waiting for the explosion like living with an abusive parent at home. We should be protecting our children. People can see why active shooter training is traumatic for kids but they think it’s fine that Larlo explodes nearby without warning and then you need to evacuate the classroom and let him destroy your things and your work? It’s honestly shameful that we allow this.

When my kids were in elementary school, one kid caused five students to change classes, one student to transfer to a different school after relentless physical and verbal bullying, and a teacher to take long term leave after the kid tripped her. In addition, the kid caused a host of misery for everyone else. My own child asked if he could spend recess in the office to avoid being outside with this bully. We need to consider the mental health consequences of trying to learn in this type of environment.

You're casting an extremely wide net if you're now including childhood bullies in the set of kids you'd like to segregate into different schools/classrooms. I'm not saying there isn't a problem to address there, but you seem to have unrealistic expectations and ideas.

I'm not talking about your typical bully. I'm talking about a kid who pushed a classmate to the concrete ground and stomped on him while he was down. He tripped and injured a teacher. I guess you think that is ok?