A lesson in history

A lesson in history

This June is my 55^th year as a licensed special educator.   I have been fortunate enough to have lived through almost the entire metamorphous of the profession.  I remember when Rosewood State Hospital was the Institution for the Feeble Minded set “way out” in the country.   Now its buildings are being demolished and the land will become part of Stevenson University.   It has not housed “patients” in many years.  The people who lived there were never sick, they were disabled and living there made them more so.

I remember as an elementary school student in Baltimore City Public Schools having a class in my school called the opportunity class.  We were not allowed to look into that room and the students stayed there until they were 16.  We never saw them out of the room, but since we were not allowed to look in, we tried to do so at every opportunity.

I remember starting my special ed teaching career in a Baltimore County high school.  My classroom was in a trailer with doors that did not fully close and windows that did not open.   I was given a set of Reader’s Digest magazines and a stack of 8” by 15” poster board for my total supply of instructional materials.  The wind opened and closed the door in winter and we knew the periods were changing when we saw the other students on the way to the vocational shop building.  In our trailer, no bells rang.

In the 60’s when I supervised secondary special ed classes in Baltimore County, one of our secondary high school rooms met in the boys' locker room of the visiting team.  When there was a home game the teacher had to vacate the locker room for the incoming sport's team.

In the 70’s, I taught at the University of Maryland, College Park.  We had student teachers in the Prince George’s County Public Schools.   The special ed classes ate lunch in an empty cafeteria AFTER the plain kids had vacated the room.  They were also not allowed on the playground at the same time the plain students were at recess.

In 1975, President Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA), the precursor to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) that we know today.  The act required that all children with disabilities receive an appropriate education at public expense.   At the time of signing, President Ford said he doubted the aims of the law could ever be achieved.  There had been multiple court cases disputing the rights of school systems to exclude some of their children just because they had disabilities.  The new law required schools to educate all kids and to provide related services such as occupational therapy, physical therapy, counseling and speech.   It was a game changer.

Today as I begin my 56^th year as a special educator, I remember the history and the long winding path we have walked to get here.   Sadly we are not done.   No one disputes the rights of the kids with disabilities to be in the school.   What is under continuing dispute is what equals an appropriate education for those kids once they are in the school building.   Come to think of it, we seem to have trouble delivering an appropriate education for plain kids as well.   Maybe we have finally arrived at full equality.

Who are the lions and who are the Christians?

Who are the lions and who are the Christians?

A Baltimore City school teacher was recently sentenced to 10 years in jail with all but three months suspended.   Ten years is a long time even though the teacher will not be serving this time.   What did he do?   Oh, nothing too much, just slammed a skinny 7-year olds head into a cinder block wall causing the child to have a concussion, developmental delays and nightmares.   Prior to the injury the boy was very outgoing, now he was too timid to even state his name in court.  

What behavior caused this reaction from the teacher?   Evidently a couple of other kids told the teacher that the boy had brought a gun to school.   According to the teacher’s report, he was trying to turn the boy so he could see to walk to the principal’s office and somehow his head got slammed into the wall.   The teacher did not know how that happened!!   However, the video of the event tells a very different story.   The judge’s comment was that if you saw the video you had to be horrified.   In issuing the sentence, the judge called the behavior of the teacher “a monstrous act”.   Yet only three months needed to be served!   Explain that?

But, in my mind the situation gets worse.   Multiple members of the school’s staff showed up at the trial wearing t-shirts supporting the teacher.   Over forty-three people sent letters in his behalf.  The boy’s mother reported that not a single member of the school reached out to her to say they were sorry or to ask how her boy was doing.

Let’s take the worst-case scenario.  What if the boy was a recurring discipline problem.   If that were true, there was no mention of it in the news article.  He was described as a skinny boy with short hair who was too afraid to approach the judge without holding his mother’s hand.  Why were all these school people supporting a colleague who, by the judge’s evaluation, had committed a monstrous act.   This was not a conflict of first-person reports.   There was a video of the event!   I would think that honorable professionals would have wanted this guy drummed out of the corps rather than have t-shirts made cheering him on.   Eventually, the “gun” discovered was a plastic cap gun.  Sure his mom should not have allowed him to take it to school, but the reaction seems to be a bit over the top.

Last spring another Baltimore City teacher was discharged for punching a student in the child’s stomach.  His excuse was that child would not settle down and was pushing him around.   That boy was a middle school student.   One of the kids in that class told a volunteer “the teacher really doesn’t like us, so we just try to stay out of his way.”

As a profession, we seem to be obsessed with having teachers pass tests to see if they have sufficient knowledge to be in the classroom.   Perhaps we are giving the wrong tests.   It seems to me we have lost our way if we are staffing our classrooms with people who are violent with our kids and other staff are leaping to their defense.   Who are the lions and who are the Christians?

Plays Well with Others

Plays well with others

Remember when everything we needed to know we learned in Kindergarten?   We learned to wait our turn, share our treats and be kind to others.   Somewhere in the rush to stuff more academic content into those young brains we forgot all about the role of schools in character building.   Now some school systems are beginning to think that perhaps character is one of the more important things we can teach our kids.   Imagine that!

Of course, we can’t outright say we are teaching character.  For some reason that does not seem to be school worthy.  So the new buzz words are social competencies.   My grandfather put it more plainly.  He frequently admonished me to learn “how to talk to people”. 

In Montgomery County, Maryland report cards tell parents whether their children are exhibiting traits like “intellectual risk taking” and metacognition, which is an understanding and awareness of an individual’s learning process. 

In Austin, Texas, elementary school report cards tell families about personal development skills and if a student takes responsibility for his/her own behavior.

The idea is supposed to be that families want to be involved in the character development of their children.  But what if they don’t?   Recently three seventh grade boys ganged up on two sixth grade girls who also happened to have learning disabilities.  The boys formed a circle around the girls, taunted them and called them names.  They accused the girls of inappropriate sexual acts.   By coincidence a faculty member from the school was getting into her car and saw the behaviors.  She broke it up and drove the girls home.  Then she informed the principal of what had gone down.   The principal called the boys and families into his office and meted out disciplinary consequences.

You would have thought if you were the parents of these boys, the school’s consequences would have been the least of it.  The old saying, “just wait until I get you home”, seemed to have an appropriate ring to it.   If you thought that you would be wrong.

Instead the family went to court to protect the free speech rights of their boys.  Evidently, these parents were more concerned about free speech than building character in their children.   The district court sided with the school system saying that previous court decisions gave school administrators the right to control speech if the speech was reasonably expected to disrupt the school.   The school system argued that since the behavior happened just off of school grounds and at dismissal time and against children in the school who would be impacted by the behavior, the school was within its rights to discipline the boys.   The district court agreed.  Not satisfied the parents appealed to the circuit court.   The circuit court also agreed.   Not to be dissuaded by the school district and two levels of the judiciary, the families appealed to the Supreme Court.   The Justices in their ultimate wisdom declined to hear the case and left the decision of the circuit court intact.

What do you think the boys learned from this experience?   Whatever the school system hoped to teach the kids was probably totally lost as the family kept pushing its case for the value of free hate speech.

We have enough hate speech in our society.   Hopefully the efforts of the school systems that are working to include character as a measure parents care about will gain some traction.

On the other hand, maybe we could go back to kindergarten and learn to play well with others.