What would you thing?

 What would you think?

 

What would you think of a special ed teacher who repeatedly shoved a first grader on the autism spectrum into a trash can, telling him that since he “acted like trash”, he “would be treated like trash”.  She also pushed him to the floor and covered his nose and mouth.  This behavior was reported to school administration, but nothing was done.

The following year, the same teacher forced him to stand all day and poured grease on him.  This behavior was also reported to school administration and nothing was done.  This boy was not the only child this teacher abused.

This little boy was sent to a private therapist by his parents because of the trauma he suffered.  The private therapist reported the abuse to the police, there was a federal trial and the teacher pleaded guilty to assault of an individual with a disability.

The boy’s parents subsequently filed a federal lawsuit against the school administration saying that their son was still suffering psychologically from the experience and that the school administration knowing what was going on had a responsibility to intervene.

The school board on behalf of itself and its administrators argued they were not liable because they had qualified immunity.   The judge ruled in favor of the school board.  He said, “the mere allegation that such disheartening (emphasis added) things occurred at their school does not show that the school officials intended them to happen.”   The boy’s parents had argued through their attorney that malice can be inferred by the officials’ “knowledge of the abuse, failure to investigate, and reckless indifference to the abuse.”

Because of the boy’s limited communication ability, it was two years before, another school and a private therapist that the whole story became known.   Even after the teacher pleaded guilty to assault on a person with a disability, the school board continued to defend and employ her.   

“Public officials can be negligent, public officials can be recklessly indifferent” said the school board’s representative.  “This is what public immunity is for”

Perhaps Mark Twain said it best, “In the first place God made idiots.  This was for practice.  Then he made school boards.”

Ain't Got no Respect

 Ain’t Got no Respect- Flor-ida-dum

 

In the good old days, teachers were not well paid; but they did get a lot of respect.  If you were a teacher or had teachers in your family, you were proud of what you had achieved.   Of course it was also true that for a woman there were essentially three professional choices- the other two being nurse or secretary.

If a kid got in trouble in school, he sometimes didn’t tell his parents for fear he would only get in more trouble at home.

Fast forward to “modern times”.   Teachers are receiving a decent salary for the work they do.  Salaries are even on the rise.  Women are able to move up the administrative ranks to become administrators and even superintendents.  That is pretty much the good news.

Today. If a child gets into trouble the parents are as likely to call a lawyer as they are to call the school to apologize.  Kids aren’t afraid to let their families know they “done wrong” because they expect the parent will work to get them out of any consequences.

Educators are trained to do their jobs which include researching and writing appropriate curriculum.  Not so in Flor-ida-dum and other states where curriculum is written by politicians and has been weaponized to secure next year’s election.  

Families are encouraged to report teachers who stray from the party line and allow students to discuss issues of concern to the students.  The whole reporting system is reminiscent of Joe McCarthy and his House Unamerican Activities committee when Americans were encouraged to report Communists in our midst during the big RED scare.  

Pacing guides, not children’s learning, determine when a teacher should move on to the next topic in the curriculum.

Now the ultimate of disrespect for teachers, the Governor of Flor-ida-dum is recruiting retired military to come and teach in Flor-ida-dum schools.   People who have served in wartime but have NO training or education on how to teach children.  Well at least they are familiar with using a weapon, another Flor-ida-dum idea, arm teachers to prevent school violence.  

Certainly is confusing why someone would not want to teach in Flor-ida-dum?  As a teacher you will be spied upon and reported if you are suspected of not following the party line, you can’t decide the curriculum, nor how to pace what you are teaching AND your government leader thinks so little of your professional skill set that he is bringing in retired military to take your place.

Rodney Dangerfield isn’t the only one with no respect, maybe it’s time to bring back the good old days.

Where oh where have all the teachers gone

 Where oh where have all the teachers gone?

 

School systems throughout Maryland are at a loss as to why so many teachers are leaving the field.  This summer saw the greatest number of teachers leaving in recent history.  So, the big question is way?

The easy, let’s not think about it too deeply, answer is that teachers need to be paid more money.    Let’s get real.  For the amount of education, days worked in a year, and benefits received, teachers are very well compensated.  The days of teachers earning $35,000 a year are very long gone and many first year teachers earn about 35% more than that at the start of their careers.    The average teacher in Maryland earns roughly $67,000.  They work about 190 days.   If you work 5 days a week for 50 weeks that is 255 days a year a great deal more than teachers work.   In the days of lower pay, the excuse was given that teachers needed to work summers to make up for the low salaries.  Not anymore and many school systems pay year round. 

Doesn’t take much investigating to determine that salary is not the issue as much as the easy solution folks would like us to believe. 

This summer a full 40% of the people leaving teaching left voluntarily.  They just didn’t like the job enough anymore.   These were people who had contracts for the upcoming school year, contracts that included hefty raises.  Another 25% left teaching but went to other education related employment.  Only 20% left because they had retired.  And perhaps most importantly, only 6% were terminated for bad performance.

There are several more significant reasons teachers are leaving.  First and foremost are the job demands that leave little time for REAL TEACHING.   There is strong pressure to limit suspensions for bad behavior.  Kids know that.  So there are full out fights in schools, serious bullying, not to mention weapons and drug deals.  Teachers are not law enforcement.  They do not want to carry weapons and they don’t want to be part of police state.  They want administrative support in quelling the bad behavior so they can TEACH.  But administrators are scored on how few students they suspend so suspensions are only happening in the very worst situation.  Generally badly behaved kids are transferred to other schools, not dissimilar from the "dance of the lemons" for bad teachers.

The demand for high stakes testing keeps growing.   Somehow or other someone got the notion that good test scores are the reflection of good teaching.   Good test scores are primarily the result of some kids being great test takers who know how to game the test.

If the two former reasons don’t convince you, there are pacing guides.  A teacher is supposed to be a professional educator.  He/she is supposed to be able to gauge when learning is or is not occurring and to make instructional adjustments.   Pacing guides do not allow those adjustments.   Name the date and the guide tells the teacher what he/she is teaching, student progress be damned.

If we want professional teachers paying them like other professions won’t do the trick.  We need to treat them like other professionals and that includes giving the best teachers the opportunity to earn the best money.

New laws are pretty queer

 New laws are pretty queer

 

In 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution failed to receive the required number of state ratifications for inclusion into the Constitution.  One of the major concerns about it was that it would require same sex bathrooms.   It didn’t, but  any lie told often enough and loud enough will gain traction and so it did.

Now we are engaged, it seems, in a great fear of homosexuality.  The American Psychological Association agreed long ago that homosexuality is not a mental disorder but a born condition.   Never mind that.   Every year more states are working to pass laws that will leave LBGTQ kids open to bullying and torment.  It is anticipated that these laws will dramatically increase the negative experiences of these kids AND significantly create an environment that is conducive to suicide.

Twenty-one states have legislatures that have introduced statutes ranging from prohibiting gender affirming treatment, using bathrooms based on the gender decided at birth, limiting discussion of homosexuality in curriculum, allowing for exemptions or discrimination based on religious reasons.  These religious reasons are exclusive rather than exclusive.   So evidently God allows for the separation and exclusion of some of his creations who do not conform to the majority of his creations.  

It is never clear exactly what the objective is in these proposed statutes.   Do people think that homosexuality is catching and these kids are going to “give” it to other kids?  Are they afraid that the homosexual lifestyle sounds so wonderful that heterosexual kids are going to want to “convert”?  Or is this a question of people wanting to impose their religious beliefs on others. 

Probably it is none of the above.  Probably it is more politicians pandering to the lowest common denominator among their constituency.  Trolling the bottom for votes.

These kids are who they are because of anything they have done.  It is how they were born just as they were born with brown hair or blue eyes.  They have enough issues to manage without being piled on by politicians who are working in their own self-interests rather than that of their constituency which happens to include LBGTQ people.  Perhaps we need to worry less about what pronouns are being used and worry more about some of these queer laws that are being passed that risk destroying innocent kids' lives.

Collateral Damage to Virtual Learning

 Collateral damage to virtual learning

 

Kids are frightened about going to school.   Some with good reason, some with no reason.  The Maryland's public schools were among the last to reopen during the coronavirus pandemic and they are paying the price now. When kids returned to school last school year they brought with them emotional troubles that led to behavioral issues for many students.   Lots of folks will tell you that social emotional learning is a waste of time and money.   But one of the major things kids learn in school is getting along with others, particularly others who are not like you and may have different life experiences.

The media amplifies gun violence in schools and there is quite a bit of violence for it to amplify.   Some students are making posturing threats on social media.  But who can tell a posture from a foreshadow of the real thing?

In Maryland, the issues are more pronounced in Baltimore City where the availability of guns in the general community cannot help but spill over into the schools.  Afterall, the teens with guns in the community do attend school.  City schools are spending anywhere from $250,000 to up to a million dollars to add metal detectors, alarm systems and closed-circuit TV to school security.

Baltimore County is supplementing its school resource officers with school safety assistants, adding as many as 3-5 assistants in both middle and high schools.   They are trained in de-escalation strategies with the hope they can prevent more aggravated violence. 

While the increase in school security hardware seems to show the public that schools are doing something, the one variable that keeps being linked to school violence and violence in general is a feeling of alienation by the shooter or fighter.  Too many SRO’s make kids feel more like suspects than students.  Rallies to increase staff salary won’t do it.  There needs to be a clear code of behavioral expectations that will be explained and agreed to by parents and students.  Then it needs to be enforced by school administrators.  If certain behaviors are unacceptable in school then the precursors of those behaviors need to be unacceptable as well.  We know the gateway behaviors and we need to stop them before they become the unacceptable violence.  Teachers and clinical staff need to get involved with kids.  Make sure every student is “seen” and known by at least one staff member.  We can spend a million dollars on security hardware, but not on staff to connect with kids. In fact, staff are even discouraged from developing relationships with kids.  There is collateral damage to only connecting via technology and that issue has come to school to fight.

Back to the future

 Back to the Future

 

About a hundred years ago, John Scopes, a young high school science teacher was accused of teaching evolution in violation of a Tennessee state law.  Scopes was defended by the star attorney of the day, Clarence Darrow.  The law made it a misdemeanor punishable by a fine to “teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man descended from a lower order of animals”.  Williams Jennings Bryan, a fundamentalist hero volunteered to assist in the prosecution.   Within days the courtroom was surrounded by spectators and reporters.  The judge worked to destroy the defense by insisting that Scopes was on trial not the theory he was teaching.  In the end, Scopes pleaded guilty and the case was appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court that overturned the verdict.   In 1968, the U.S Supreme Court overturned  a similar Arkansas law on the grounds that it violated the free speech requirement of the First Amendment.

Fast forward about 100 years.   Now we are engaged in another fight over the right to teach and free speech.   Tennessee and Arkansas are at it again.  They are among the currently nine states that have forbidden the teaching of critical race theory (CRT).   Of course, CRT is neither a curriculum nor an identifiable set of topics or facts.   But it is being banned none-the-less.  CRT asks us to teach American history in a 360 mode.  The good news, the bad news and the in between news.  It asks that we do not deny the ugly; it does not ask that we ignore the good.  

Let’s suppose good old Jack Social Studies is teaching in Tennessee. Might not be the best idea since Tennessee seems to have a habit of restricting what is taught in schools.   In the course of teaching US history, he teaches about the terrible legacies of slavery, Jim Crow laws, immigration restrictions, and real estate red lining.  Under current Tennessee law, Good Old Jack could lose his job.  The laws in some states forbid teachers from teaching about historical instances that would make students feel bad.  Does that mean we don’t teach about WWII because students of German ethnicity might feel bad?  What will happen if Jack Social Studies gets punished for teaching what informants think is CRT?   Will these state laws be overturned as a violation of Mr. Social Studies First Amendment rights?   Or will the Supreme Court, which seems to be suffering from memory loss, also forget its 1968 decision.  Everything old is new again. 

 

When is an IEP NOT a contract for service?

 When is an IEP not a contract for service?

 

And IEP is a legal contract for service according to both state and federal law.  But what exactly does that contract mean in real time terms. Sometimes not much.

The law stipulates that a member of the IEP team must include someone with the authority to commit the resources of the school system.  Much of the time that person is not in attendance at the meeting.  Consequently, commitments are made on the IEP but there is no commitment of resources to deliver.    

Speech therapy services are routinely not delivered as specified on the IEP.  Lack of staff is generally given as the reason.

Transportation is a related service on an IEP.  Many families do not know this fact so they just assume that transportation will be delivered.   Transportation was made a related service since it was determined early on that offering a program but without a system to get the child to the program was an empty promise.   This situation is particularly true because it is not unusual for the special education services to be offered in a school other that the child’s home school.  Transportation, as other related services, must be added to the IEP as a related service.  Otherwise, the child falls into the general transportation pool.

Since the pandemic school systems have struggled mightily to maintain a sufficient number of bus drivers.  When they can’t, the system cancels transportation and/or offers families reimbursement of a mileage fee if they transport.

Here’s the rub, many families do not have the vehicle or the people to pick up and deliver children to school particularly if those schools are a good distance from the child’s home.

The situation is different for plain kids.  First and foremost, plain kids do not have a legal right to transportation.    It is a service provided by the school district.  Secondly, almost all plain kids go to a neighborhood school.  Children with disabilities are supposed to have a binding contract for that service if the parents were smart enough to include it in the IEP.  So what happens when the school district unilaterally decides there will be no transportation on any given day.   Unfortunately, usually not much.   Sure, parents jump and shout and complain.   But they seldom file a formal complaint with the State Department of Education and the local school system for a violation of the child’s IEP.   Families struggle to try to get their kids to school some kind of way.   But the children lose out.   And the legal contract for a service as written in the IEP is a contract written in disappearing ink.