tough

the special education department in the school district i work for is going through a transition. i have hope that things are moving in the right direction, but we are definitely not yet where we need to be. the idea is a move towards services rather than programs but how this looks in reality has not really been spelled out. say you have a kid who needs a ton of support at school for various reasons, but who also has a lot of skills and potential he doesn't always show. say the school district recommends he gets the highest level of support it can offer, which it says is a "severely impaired special day class" even though the idea we are transitioning toward is that kids just need "specialized academic instruction" for a certain amount of their day rather than being placed in a certain category. it is hard not to hear this and not think your kid is being labeled "severely impaired" and it is hard not to disagree with the recommendation when you visit the class where your kid is assigned and see that all the other kids in this class are not verbal and that there is very little interaction between kids happening. tough tough tough.

i am sure this is not so interesting to you non-special education readers, but we really need to do better. what can be better in these crappy budget times? getting rid of the special day class categories and just looking more at student:teacher ratio would be a good start, but would cost more money. if a kid needs a high ratio of teachers: students, a small class, and a lot of specialized academic instruction can't we provide this without grouping the kids in such a leveled way? if leveling/tracking is not OK in general education elementary why is it OK in special education at the elementary level? maybe REALLY individualizing the ieps, because there really are some very unique kids who don't fit in neatly as severely impaired, mild-moderate or emotionally disturbed (which are some of the names of classes the district can recommend they be placed in) by assigning some of these hard to place kids to specific teachers, with specific paras, at specific schools that might be the best match. this would open a huge can of worms, of course, and probably can't happen. but it might be a start. i felt on the wrong side of the table today making a recommendation that did not seem so great, but was the best we could come up with. of course we can tell this parent that if she goes downtown and is a squeaky wheel she might get a different offer. i hope she does, but felt a lot of compassion today for a parent in a tough situation.

there is a lot of "it will all work out in the end" talk in my work and parenting life, and in general i believe this talk is true, but it would be nice if some of the pain could be avoided in the first place.