Question for MS/HS teachers- % IEP/504 and your time

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I would love to give great praise to the teacher who outlined all of the responsibilities that they face meeting accommodations. Perhaps the community at large would realize that there’s far more to teaching than just going in, presenting a lesson and taking a few papers home to grade. It’s obvious that she cares deeply for her profession. Some of the accommodations are completely unbelievable and almost impossible to fulfill. Extended time is one of them.

My DC got extended time and a reader and a scribe due to profound dyslexia and dysgraphia. It just takes longer with a live reader and scribe. Now that he is in college, his reader and scribe are electronic and it goes much faster. Part of this is because the technology has improved so much and part of it that it takes time to learn how to use the technology. He was not proficient at it until the middle of 12th grade or so. Extended time is neither unbelievable nor impossible to fill. He went to the LD office for all his assessments. The classroom teacher did not have to provide those accommodations.

A few years ago, I had a student with dyslexia who needed to have all assessments read out loud to hear and needed to give responses orally. The student had 100% extended time. In theory, an IA should have administered the assessments, but I was told that we were short on IAs that year and I just had to do it myself. Each of the student's assessments ended up taking two to three hours of my time after school, roughly three times a month. That was one on one time where I couldn't do anything else and for privacy and ambient noise reasons, couldn't even have other students in the room. My kids were grown and self-sufficient by then, but I can't conceive of how a teacher with a young family could have made this work. In fact, I can't conceive of how teachers with young kids manage to teach--I routinely put in 60-70 hour work weeks.

[Anonymous]

Teachers please note that it’s also extremely stressful for the student to constantly have to use study hall or stay after for the extra time. But my child would literally fail quizzes or tests without it bc they can’t complete them in a shorter window of time. It’s so frustrating as a parent to watch this cycle. And my child does extremely well on the tests, but it just eats up so much of their time. It breaks my heart because my child has no time for anything else other than finishing work. They are exhausted.

[Anonymous]

Also the temptation to just give various accommodations to the entire class, while understandable and widely common, has the side effect of accommodating kids who were not yet diagnosed, so they never get diagnosed, so when they leave your classroom, they are blindsided by a disability they didn't know they had because they were doing "fine" in school.