Reply to Teacher shot at Newport News elementary school

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have a theory why the admins acted as they did.  (I think they were wrong and should be criminally charged.) Schools over the last few decades have been over referring students of color for special education evaluations and services.  Black students are 4x as likely to receive referrals and IEP placement than their white peers.  Not because they need services more, but because they are more likely to be seen as violent, or as cognitively impaired, or they aren't offered interventions through the RTI process like white students would be, etc.  That's a real problem that's lead to an unintended consequence.

Many schools now stall or refuse to evaluate or recommend an IEP for children of color because they are receiving pressure from their state boards of education to not do so.  This means, kids who truly, truly need to be evaluated, like this student who shot his teacher, are not getting what they need.  I've seen this myself and have been told this myself in meetings with sped teams on why they want years (yes, years) of "intervention" or why they won't recommend an IEP.  They don't want to get dinged by the state.  I have had several students where I've kept dozens of pages worth of incidents around safety, along with dozens of pages of notes on interventions taking up the entire year or more, tons of meeting notes, etc. and the sped team delays, or denies what the teacher is saying.  The people who know the child the least (ie, the sped admin, the principal, the speech path, the OT, the nurse, anyone on the "team" who spends 0-30 min a week with a kid vs. the teacher who spends 35+ hours with the kid) are "outvoting" the teacher who KNOWS the kid needs serious help.  It's why I'm looking to leave education.

I'm all for including kids with special needs.  But kids, diagnosed or not, who repetitively hurt others, kids who are unsafe enough that the room needs to be evacuated more than once or twice, kids who make violent threats, etc, need some other kind of placement.  We're seeing a dramatic rise in students who are dangerous to others and they need something different.  Time for taxes to rise to cover both their educational and medical care.

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You’ve absolutely nailed it. [/quote]

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