Reply to Should I tell parent that LT friendship with her DD is now a burden for other girl?

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Reply to "Should I tell parent that LT friendship with her DD is now a burden for other girl?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My son was put in a care taking role for another student. Without my knowledge the SN parent had requested that our sons be in the same class - year after year. So the teachers - year and year, I think, relied very heavily on my son to look after this boy. One academic year I wouldn't have given it much thought, but when I found out it had been years of elementary school, I was very unhappy.[/quote]

How could you be oblivious to this for years?[/quote]

We were new to the area and this is a common practice.[/quote]

I'm OP and agree with the PP that this is a pretty common practice. I get 4-5 requests a year (exclusively from parents of girls with SN) to seat/group two students together as a social-emotional support that will ease school anxiety and thus aid instruction. It has never backfired for me before. [b]However, after this situation and the anecdotes shared by PPs, I will be very hesitant to agree to in in the future[/b].[/quote]

OP, you are throwing out the baby with the bath water.  You get 4-5 requests a year and this is the first that didn't work.  Having a familiar or friendly kid in the same class or sitting a child next to a peer doesn't make that peer "responsible" for them.  It was a "reasonable" accommodation; it just wasn't a good fit in this case.

You don't know if the anecdotes shared here are based on prejudice or not.  The PP complains that her kid was in the same class with the same kid with SN--on purpose.  Oh, the horror.   He doesn't sound the worse for wear and she's only [i]assuming after the fact[/i] that the teachers overly relied on her kid.  She doesn't actually know.

Personally, I am skeptical of the utility of peer role models.  My kid was in an public preschool program that was meant to integrate SN with their typically developing peers.  The NT kids essentially ignored the SN kids, but there were some that would pinch the non-verbal kids.  I saw this when volunteering and mentioned it to the teacher.  I was told, "That's never happened before."  Well, it was an ongoing thing b/c I'd see the same kids doing it on field trips and in subsequent years.

People are often concerned about their kid picking up "behaviors" from the SN kids, but truly some NT peers aren't all they're cracked up to be.

In the future, I wouldn't dismiss this tactic out of hand, but I would let the parents asking know that it's subject to change.  I would also look for alternative ways a SN child can be supported.[/quote]

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