My kid is in a class with a chair thrower

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I would be so scared for my child. If I wasn’t satisfied with the school’s response and I couldn’t reassign my child I would have DC wear a helmet and full protective gear. Seriously, I’m not risking bodily injury for my child for the sake of not offending a violent classmate.

I’m really curious what protective suit you make them wear when they’re in the car…

They have seatbelts and airbags and a safe driver. I don’t allow object throwers in my vehicle. See, society has devised ways to protect people from bodily harm in their vehicles. Why not in the classroom?

Right, but those monkey bars and slides are death traps. Also amusement park rides, planes, pools, even the car seats have death warnings on them. Hell, paper cuts can sting. So never mind bubble wrap your kid and watch the boy in the bubble episode from Seinfeld!

You're a pretty sick twisted individual. Defending this nonsense makes you seem more insane than empathetic. What is actually wrong with you?

I’m making fun of your anxiety. Catastrophizing (When a person fixates on the worst possible outcome and treats it as likely, even when it is not) doesn’t help you make sense of the world, but humor can help. So, Seinfeld to the rescue.

But your child being in virtual classes for a few months until appropriate support can be arranged is a tragedy, right?

These parents don’t want to be around their own kids, full stop. The rest is noise. The woman nattering on about anxiety is just a clown, desperate for anyone to pay serious attention to her. She’s worth nothing.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Counties hide behind LRE to act like it’s the legal requirement for a certain child. In reality mainstream classes are just cheaper. Self-contained is way more expensive so they try to keep anyone they can mainstream. Even if the classroom teacher and the sped teacher and the parents agree the placement is not working, the county will fight it. I’ve seen it happen.

Private schools are failing because of this. Parents will not use them and vote to defund them. It is a death spiral.

You know what is also expensive? TJ. But the school board finds the money to help the advanced kids get even more advanced. They found the money for that. So the kids who are just normal are in the classroom with the disruptive kids and the majority go downhill because they don't have the same advocacy power.

What mainstreaming does is turn regular classrooms into special education classrooms, but it is the wrong fit for everyone.

+1

Schools need SPED rooms, but the SPED parents fight it.

"Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"

Safety from violence for children in school now, tomorrow and forever!

YES

Get kids the help they need, dammit.

Where were these issues 30, 40, 50 years ago? What has changed?

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.

You aren’t wrong. But there are far far too many kids with this now diagnosed “special needs” for the public school system to handle. Public schools should be responsible for providing a baseline education for all. But if you have a child that requires
1:1 care, special tutoring, emotional support, etc. that should not and cannot be the schools burden. That should be coordinated by the parents with the child’s doctors and mental health care provider through the parent’s insurance. Your kid needs a 1:1 aide to stay in class without violence? The parent works with their heathcare team to find one and then sends them to school with their child. There are too many kids that need special accommodations for schools to be expected to handle it- they can’t do it while still meeting the needs of all the other average kids. Why has this burden fallen on schools? They aren’t psych wards.

Best comment so far!

-1 No one requires health care insurance in this country. Until that happens, you can’t hold the medical community responsible for in school anything. Of course, it should be wrap around care. It isn’t. It isn’t even required to have health insurance for your kid. Maybe you are starting to see just how thin and full of holes our social safety net is.

If kids cannot be in-person safely then let them do virtual. The healthcare burden of the child is not on the school system.

Is the burden of feeding a child on the school system? Why so many free breakfasts and lunches? If there is no support for mental health in the schools, then then the mobile medical/dental vans also should not be part of the school system. Why do guidance counselors in title 1 schools work closely with county housing commissions to find affordable housing for their students families. That certainly goes beyond the education of the enrolled student.

As someone posted earlier, the school systems are the last remaining social safety net. When parents can't, society steps in to assist. You can't say we will support and assist families with everything but mental health.

The argument is that children who are acting out are having a direct impact on children that are not acting out. That's what everyone is objecting to. But if you don't support the child, the child acts out. If you don't feed the child, the child will learn to find food elsewhere. If you don't provide clothing for the child, the child will obtain clothing elsewhere---in other words, you create a child that needs to steal in order to provide for themselves. Now you've created a criminal. Do the crimes have a direct impact on you---physically no; but financially yes. We all see prices are increasing as a result of an increase in theft from retailers.

I'm looking at the long term implications and people on this thread arguing against keeping chair throwers in the classroom are only concerned about the immediate impact to their child.

The point is to put professionals in these positions (eg, social workers) to work outside of, but in concert with schools. Teachers are expected to do too much outside of their "regular duties." They can't be social worker, therapist, nurse, etc. all at once. They are not trained specifically in these areas. They are there to teach. Yes, they may be able to lend an ear or bring in a snack once in a while, but some of these kids are too much to handle -- especially when there is more than one in the classroom. These kids need specialized help before returning to the school/classroom.

I think everyone here agrees you can’t expect the classroom teacher alone to handle these students with special needs. The schools need to bring in additional supports into the classroom to help the student avoid triggers and to work on coping mechanisms and social/emotional skills. Developing those skills typically requires an environment with peer interaction, so removing the student would be counterproductive.

Basically you’re saying it’s the obligation of the other families to sacrifice their own children’s well being to help this other child.

There are a lot of ways I work to raise kids who are kind and understanding and inclusive. Asking them to tolerate being threatened and in a high stress environment daily is not okay. The levels of cortisol and long-term health implications of being in that environment are not insignificant, on top of the immediate day to day risk and impact on their education.

You have phrased this so well. And there is zero ethical counter argument to this - it’s just one raving ass-hair “making fun” of what she desperately wants to dismiss as anxiety in adults and kids (how…sensitive to kids with special needs! Let’s all admire her beneficence as she racks her three brain cells for a musty Seinfeld reference and a web link of anecdata that looks like it was scanned from a dot-matrix printout.)