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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I know this isn't politically correct to say, but it needs to be said.

I'm very sorry for the families with very high need special needs children.  I am.  I understand how expensive it is, and why they need the support.  However, a lot of our problems in public schools right now are due to the fact that the system has gone overboard in accommodating every child with every situation.  There are children who need 1:1 or even 2:1 attention and need far more help and support than the teaching system can accommodate.  And when you have 5-12 SPED teachers who are handling a school of 300-600 students and you have several children who need 1:1 attention, then you are taking away those teachers from supporting the children who need mild or a middle amount of support.  Then the regular teachers who are already teaching 20-25 students have to take their time to provide the support for the milder cases.  The schools currently do not have the staff and cannot hire the staff to provide the support for the children who need a high amount of attention.

The system cannot sustain itself with the no child left behind policy.  And while i understand how beneficial it is for these children to be in the regular gen ed population, the system needs to set up special education services for the children with extreme special needs.  I've watched three children over my children's elementary school years that demanded so many resources from the SPED and regular teachers that it severely weakened the services they were providing to hundreds of other children.  That's unsustainable when we start the year with holes in the staffing that have not been filled.

And until we can address the huge drain on the teaching staff caused by a handful of students, we are not going to see the situation get better for teachers.[/quote]

The thing these posters never seem to think about is that children with special needs don't somehow magically require significantly less support in a segregated classroom environment. Some might be able to get by with slightly less support, generally if the curriculum expectations are heavily modified, but that is more than offset by the expenses of running separate schools for these children.

Just be honest and say you don't want your children to have to be exposed to kids with special needs.[/quote]

No, I don't want my children to be exposed to kids with extreme special needs.  My children were friends with and got along with several children with IEPs and 504s and had no problems.  But there were two extreme children that I did not want around my children, but I had no choice.  The one child threw furniture at my child, hit him in the head with a book, kicked him until he bruised, and choked him because my son had the audacity to check out a book from the media center that this child wanted.  My child had to go to the nurse four times over 2 school years for multiple injuries from this child.  On multiple occasions, when this child had one of his regular tantrums, the entire classroom had to go and sit in the hallway and miss out on their classes until a SPED teacher could be sent from another location in the school to come and calm the child down.  This child did hundreds of dollars of damage to school equipment like when he threw a screen projector on the ground, or when he threw a chair and broke a window.  And yet, the school could not remove this child from the classroom where he was a danger to the teacher and other children.  We were fortunate that after two years, the child's family moved out of our school zone.

The second child stabbed another child with a pencil.  Pulled another girl's hair until she bled.  Threw another child's lunch on the ground (and the child had allergies so could not eat the school lunch and her mother was called to bring her another lunch).

No, these children do NOT belong in the general population.  It isn't just the costs, but also the fact that they are endangering the other students and the staff.  But the IEPs and 504s do not allow the school administration to remove them from the general population, so they continue to endanger other children and staff.[/quote]

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