Reply to MCPS teachers - what would you tell parents in your class(es) if you could?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m not a special education teacher but a general education teacher. From what I have seen, no one is trying to lie and hide things on purpose. The special education team at my school genuinely cares about kids and advocates for them. [b]It just becomes impossible sometimes to provide all the supports that some students need. [/b]The staff is overwhelmed. Some iep meetings take several hours and that is just for one student. Some parents can also be unreasonable and unrealistic. Lawsuits happen frequently and cause additional stress along with an extra deluge of paperwork. [/quote]

[b]This is like saying it's impossible for me to stop at all stop signs and red lights.[/b] 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.
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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. [/quote]

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.[/quote]

NP. And what you aren't grasping is that there is no more staff to request. They can't fill the vacancies they already have, let alone filling new ones. The SLP's caseload is ALREADY too high, has been too high for years, and no help is coming, because the district posts the positions and nobody applies. Everybody knows they need more allocation; whether the teacher says honestly in an IEP meeting that they can or can't do what's being discussed, doesn't matter, because they won't get any help either way. You sound so naive and literal-minded, thinking that there's a straight line path from "teachers are honest about their needs in IEP meetings, means the district will know to hire enough staff!" Nope. They try. They can't find people. They paper the cracks with long-term subs and contractors and pulling their other providers in to cover so they're effectively working more than full time, which burns them out and causes them to quit, which exacerbates the issue. These vacancies are sitting listed in MCPS Careers for 6+ months. The first step is making special ed a job people actually want to do.

I truly believe that IDEA is past its breaking point. It's a bottomless, unfunded pit of endless entitlements. If Congress isn't going to fully fund it, they need to cap the entitlements and give IEP teams the legal ability to be honest and say no, we can't manage XYZ, the max is ABC. Not politically popular? Then fund it. The current magical thinking is breaking everything. [/quote]

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