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Elementary School-Aged Kids
My kid is in a class with a chair thrower
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Anonymous
Yes. Public schools are now expected to provide breakfast, lunch, weekend meals, psychologists, therapists, mobile medical/dental vans come to our school…and on and on. Now add in so many kids now have “special needs” and this is an unreasonable burden for a public school system. |
Anonymous
No idea what you are talking about. Who pays for a kid’s school clothes, school supplies, meals, etc? Anyone having kids should expect to pay for them. Not all school options are free, and for many families and for many reasons, free school is not an option. I would never assume that free school is even an option for an individual kid. |
Anonymous
YES Get kids the help they need, dammit. Where were these issues 30, 40, 50 years ago? What has changed? |
Anonymous
+1 education doesn’t even seem like a priority anymore |
Anonymous
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So we got rid of caning naughty kids at school because we didn’t want violence in our schools, no kid should be touched by someone else since you don’t have the right, etc.
But now things have swung wildly in the opposite direction where it’s not the naughty kids being hit but it’s the naughty kids doing the hitting and it’s the innocent well behaved kids suffering and somehow that’s all legal and only a few people have a problem with it. It sounds insane to me. I’d rather go back to the first model. |
Anonymous
Lots of things have changed: Age of parents, micro plastics in our water and bodies, more chemicals in the air, the onset of on demand television and computer games. So many factors, but yes, adhd and autism are on the rise and it isn’t just that we diagnose more. |
Anonymous
No idea what I'm talking about? Are you the PP who said ONLY parents of school aged children should pay for public schools, thus ending free public education as a taxpayer funded service with a larger social benefit? Nobody has said anything about parents ceasing to pay for kids clothing, food, and shelter so I'm not sure where that came from. Most parents in the US do in fact assume free public schools will work for their kid. They do for most kids. It's really unfortunate they don't have the level of funding needed for the highest needs kids, but I don't see how turning this into "only rich people should have kids" helps. |
Anonymous
ADHD and autism weren’t widely diagnosed like now. That seems to compromise vast majority what special needs kids are diagnosed with as their disability. The chair thrower used to just be the naughty kid that isn’t allowed back in school until he can behave. Now the chair thrower gets diagnosed with ADHD and the school is forced to deal with him and provide a 1:1 aide. Neither is the correct move |
Anonymous
Yes, free school is an option for EVERY kid in the United States. Not just an option, but an enshrined right. |
Anonymous
Majority of my peers cannot use public schools for their kids, for various reasons. So they pay tuition, which is really no big deal. The costs of raising children are huge and tuition doesn’t make much of a difference. When you rely on free schools, you could be making a mistake, which is really what this thread is about. Many people no longer want to continue funding it since it isn’t working. |
Anonymous
I can modify that to say it is a bad option for many kids. It is just not a reasonable option. It is often unreasonable. |
Anonymous
I don’t see why we have to draw the line at the aide. Your grandchild is the chair thrower, your grandchild gets an aide. I don’t see why my tax dollars need to pay for a bunch of kids who are not mine but the aide crosses a line |
Anonymous
A five figure bill for 12 years is a HUGE deal for the majority of Americans, who on average make less than six figures. People scramble to pay for childcare just for the first five. |
Anonymous
30, 40, 50 years ago we didn’t provide schooling for these kids. They were either kicked out of school and their parents responsibility or they were sent to “schools” that were essentially warehousing kids and providing little to no education. Also, most of the diagnoses that exist today did not exist then. That doesn’t mean that the conditions didn’t exist but that we wrote them off as kids being stupid or low IQ, for LDs, class clowns or very active kids, for ADHD, and kids with Autism and the like probably never even made it into school. Today there is a requirement to educate everyone. That includes providing school for kids who are low IQ and not able to learn. There are classrooms at every school for kids who will not learn to read or do math. Normally these classrooms are self contained and the kids are not destructive. They are kids and they are hopefully developing social skills and learning some skills that will help them live their lives as adults. Kids with LDs and no behavioral issues can be helped with reading and math interventions but many times the schools do a crap job with that. There are not enough educators with the necessary training to help the non-violent kids who need specialized instruction, like OG for reading or scribing for dysgraphia. Friends with kids who have IEPs for LDs regularly tell stories of basic accommodations being ignored. Toss in kids with emotional dysregulation due to a mental health issue or ADHD or Autism or Sensory issues and you are dealing with kids who cannot control their emotions for a wide variety of reasons. We have a good number of Teachers who are not trained in how to work with kids like this. Because of past issues with abuse, laws have changed that prevent Teachers or Staff from physically restraining kids or moving kids from the room, which is why rooms are evacuated and kids are left to destroy things. In the past we labeled kids and just brushed them to the side. Today we realize that many of the kids with disabilities can be educated and can become productive adults. If we provide the kids with the proper supports and help, we can decrease the number of adults in jail or receiving assistance from the government. It should be less expensive to society to help kids with disabilities. The problem is that we do not fund the programs properly. We don’t pay the Teachers in these much harder and challenging positions enough to entice people to those positions. We don’t have the specialized schools and rooms available to be able to help the kids who need the help. We are relying on Teachers without the proper training to educate these kids and they simply do not have the resources or education to do so. Federal law requires we educate all kids but doesn’t provide the funding that is needed to actually achieve this goal. Poor families with limited education don’t realize what services their kids should receive. Well off families with more moderate issues, like LDs and ADHD, maybe Autism 1, can afford, or at least make it work, the specialized schools to help their kids. Well off families with kids with more serious issues know that there are not specialized schools for their kids and know that the only route for them is the Public School system. They can afford the lawyers and advocates to get their kids IEPs with expensive accommodations, which the Federal Government has mandated be provided. We have a crappy situation that is caused by an unfunded mandate by the Federal Government, with good intentions, that has left local Public Schools unable to meet the needs of a small percentage of kids that leads to the rare event of kids throwing chairs and being violent in a Gen Ed classroom. It scares the crap out of the parents of the kids in the class, for good reason. It is complicated and sad for all. |
Anonymous
+1 from a NP and a Special Ed teacher. All of this is spot on. I haven't previously commented but if OP is in any position to do so, love bomb the hell out of the teacher and get other parents to do the same. Tell him/her how much you appreciate them. Write supportive emails and cc the principal. This isn't what the teacher signed up for and this student almost certainly has issues that cannot be met in a regular classroom. I guarantee the admin will throw the teacher under the bus if a student ends up getting hurt. There's also a good chance the teacher is putting out resumes already and looking for another job. |