MCPS teachers - what would you tell parents in your class(es) if you could?
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Anonymous
Yes, some do, and some don't. Not all of us do. |
Anonymous
We are promised a "30 minute duty free- and UNPAID lunch" I have worked elementary and secondary. At elementary level, you lose a guaranteed 5 minutes at minimum to dropping off and/or picking up your class from lunch/recess. In secondary, you typically lose a few due monitoring the increasingly monstrous hallway behaviors. In BOTH levels, you lose 10 to the copy machine that was jammed during your planning time, or the other 3 times you tried so far that week. Please just be kind. There are so many things out of our control and so many people to please. You want less screen time, but our copiers are "refurbished" from 1985. You want us to be tech-savvy, but we're forced to use 3 different platforms in hopes you (the parents) might interact with one. WE ARE TRYING! Also, understand that because YOU have attended school before does not make you an expert on "SCHOOL." I have found that many adults simplify what school should be based on their own experiences. I have never been a surgeon, so I wouldn't tell one what to do differently when they are working on my child. But since everyone has had a school experience, many seem emboldened to tell the teacher what they are doing wrong without seeing the broad picture of what we are tasked with everyday to make 30+ children progress (and hopefully LEARN) day to day. School is not the same as when you attended. You are not an expert. ***Most importantly, never send your kids to school with RoseArt crayons. They are legit trash. |
Anonymous
Yep. I am not trained, but my mom worked with high needs populations for the NYC Dept of Education for 15 years. She has been in countless IEP meetings and has advocated for the needs of all sorts of kids. She continues to work as a housing advocate, and ends up helping the individuals in her caseload with countless other things too, including custody, access to SNAP and SSI, etc. You probably would look at her and think she’s just another rich white woman. She is, but she takes the subway every day from Manhattan to Bed-Stuy and Queens to help very high needs individuals and their families access the services they need. |
Anonymous
When you don’t allow kids to keep their own stuff you get the cheap stuff. I’ll send in extras in case they break or kids don’t have any. |
Anonymous
| There's a reason I send my kids to private school. MCPS is on the decline. |
Anonymous
Private schools have their own set of issues. Like how they are in the business of keeping things “private”. You don’t know about any of the scandals because there is even less accountability for private schools in the state of MD than public. |
Anonymous
It's not "paperwork" - it's federal laws. If you and your sped colleagues refused to lie and forge, admin would have to request additional resources. And you have union protection, so what can admin threaten? That they will break your fingers? What everybody knows is that MoCo is the richest county in the state, and one of the richest in the nation. MCPS has a 3 billion $ annual budget. It spends upwards of 20 million a year on lawyers to fight IEPs. It spent a million on a study done by outside consultants how to re-divide budgets of PTAs made up of parent donations in the name of equity (that's not public money and not MCPS domain to begin with). Of course they didn't implement anything from that study, because parents would simply stop donating if it went to a MCPS office that channeled it to some other schools. All this malarkey they somehow have money for. But they scrimp and save on sped, paras, etc PRECISELY because educators and schools keep mum and lie to parents. You understand who it's not poor you? It's you who enables this vicious cycle. |
Anonymous
Exactly. I used to have sympathy for classroom teachers with students with significant support needs, but this thread demonstrates they are largely responsible for the mess that MCPS has created in special education. |
Anonymous
This is like saying it's impossible for me to stop at all stop signs and red lights. It slows me down, increases gas consumption, wears out brake pads. Sped is governed by a federal law. It's literally your school's admin's job to request the resources. So why bother them with that, right, it's not nice to force the admin to their job and the central to do their job? Why make noise to all these important people who allocate budgets. Instead, in your head you call it "it just becomes impossible" and poof, it's just an amorphous concept. Nobody to blame, it's just how it is. No, dude, no. Reminds me how they said about Vietnam war in the end "Mistakes were made". Decision makers f'ed up big time, costing lives and resources, hiding their failures, etc... Buck stops somewhere, always. You're enabling people who get paid to allocate resources by pretending that no big deal is happening here. |
Anonymous
Class size is a political issue that goes beyond MCPS. The county keeps authorizing more and more development without making plans for corresponding increases in infrastructure and public services. More taxpayers but not more services for them. Horrendous traffic, overcrowded metro, class size, etc. all stem from here. The county's demographer is either a biggest moron or biggest hypocrite on the public payroll. I've seen assessment of impact for one of developments in whitman pyramid and they claimed that 400+ residential units will only contribute 20-30 more students to the local ES. People rent in this cluster to get their kids into public schools, but the county uses some 1960s methodology that says that SFH typically send kids to schools, and those who live in apartments are seniors or single young professionals... Honestly, the more i live in MoCo the less democrat I am becoming. |
Anonymous
No, for your analogy to work there would have to be 15-20 signs at every intersection. All of them are there for a reason, and all of them deserve to be followed. Good luck trying to follow all of them at once! I'm a parent of a kid with an IEP who has had an awful time in MCPS. We have an advocate, and while that helps tremendously it doesn't change the number of staff available at school on a given day (unless you're talking about a 1:1 being part of a plan). I definitely agree there are some people who should not be teaching at all and definitely not teaching special education students. We have definitely been at schools were staff were actively being difficult to push special needs kids out. But unless you have spent time in a classroom recently, you just don't understand how thinly stretched gen ed and special ed teachers are right now. There are a lot of really good teachers who genuinely want to help every kid in their class and on their caseload and it's just not possible. |
Anonymous
| No schools in the US have small class sizes except those that are Title One and Focus schools as the schools get extra money from the feds in ES to offer that. |
Anonymous
Nope. I’m not going to take the blame for you. I quit because I LITERALLY COULD NOT DO what I was being told to do. I’m saying NO HUMAN would be able to do what I was told to do without being gifted supernatural abilities. Instead of lying, I stood up for myself. When I was threatened, I quit. You can say that I “enabled the vicious cycle” and I’ll call you out on that. You will not get away with bullying me. I’ve been down that road. |
Anonymous
I think you are failing to grasp what I am saying. Schools (ie. admins) have to request more resources, the school district is legally obligated to provide them. These resources are based on IEP and needs (e.g. 1:1 paraeducator, increased hrs of speech or OT would necessitate allocation of SLP or OT accordingly, small group instruction would require additional staff in classrooms). This is not happening because teachers lie in IEP meetings and in IEP reporting and paperwork. It's that lie that enables the school to pretend that they don't need more para educators, more sped teachers, etc. There is a cause and effect, you see where I am going? If admin and teachers pretend something, then they don't get funding for what's really happening. This is how big classrooms and lack of staffing happens. It doesn't materialize from spare molecules. Admin and teachers create this situation. Woe is me overstretched teacher who lied in an IEP meeting pushed themselves into that corner. How they don't get it is beyond me. |
Anonymous
I grasp what you are saying, and I think you're incorrect. Yes, schools can add more hours to a kid's plan, and if that happens to enough kids at the same school hours for staffing allocations go up. But what you're not grasping is the staffing problem that especially affects special ed. You can create a position, but if there's no person to fill it, those newly allocated hours go unfilled. My own kid's program is short staffed right now, so I'm living this. The staff this school does have will do their best to make things work while crossing their fingers and hoping more staff will be hired soon. My advocate coming in for a meeting can't make people apply to these positions. A lawyer getting involved can't hire staff that don't exist. I do think it would help to fill special ed para positions if they were all listed as permanent positions with benefits rather than temporary part time, but that's another discussion. |