Update 2: So I have seen a message from President Liza Rankin on why she, Director Evan Briggs, and Director Michelle Sarju backed out of this meeting. In a nutshell: - She says there was no organization to the meeting which is just not true. They had a moderator lined up and naturally the board members could have set parameters for what to discuss, length of meeting, etc. All that was fleshed out. - She also claimed that if the meeting was PTA sponsored, they needed to have liability insurance to use the school space. Hello? PTAs use school space all the time and know they have to have this insurance. - She seems to be worried about the Open Public Meetings law. Look, if she has a meeting in a school building on a non-personnel topic, it should be an open meeting. It appears that Rankin is trying, over and over, to narrow the window of access that parents have to Board members. She even says in her message - "...with decisions made in public." Hmmm - She also says that th
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Now we have the "new inclusion", that is, inclusion without any inclusion programs, just dumping kids in buildings without support.
The thing is, parents aren't going to just send their kids to self-contained placements anymore. These kids will be in your classrooms. Schools with inclusion programs are all pretty great: Montlake, Lafayette, Graham Hill, John Hay, Lawton, Blaine, Salmon Bay, Eckstein, Roosevelt... unfortunately, the "new inclusion" won't be like any of those, because nobody's going to be working there. At least, not anybody with a college degree.
This is how to hold everyone accountable.
"Anyone Achieving must be Stopped."
This language needs to be added to the Strategic Plan .... and the SPS letter heading is in need of revision.
You can enroll your child in a school with the Integrated Comprehensive Services or you can enroll your child in a self-contained program.
In the ICS school your child will be dropped into a general education class with no assurance of support, no assurance that the IEP will be followed, and no assurance of protection from bullies. Services, if any, will be provided sporadically by a trained teacher in a resource room who will either periodically visit your child's class or be periodically visited by your child in a "pull-out" program.
In the self-contained program your child will in a ghetto of disabled students and only ever see typically developing peers at lunch (and maybe gym or music). You still won't have any assurance that your child's IEP will be followed or that they will do anything more academically challenging than coloring all day.
Whichever one you choose, the district will respond to your complaints with "Well, you chose that for your child."
The District wants families to choose the self-contained model because that is easier for them to manage operationally. As in all decisions at Seattle Public Schools, the operations tail wags the academic dog.
Inclusion, when it is done right, can be absolutely brilliant for every child in the classroom. It cannot, however, be done right without the proper staffing and training. There is no indication that Seattle Public Schools is interested in providing the proper staffing or training to make it work for any of the children in the classroom.
The "resource room" version of Special Education services is detached from reality. It's like putting one hand in 145 degree water and one hand in 35 degree water and thinking that it should be comfortable because the average water temperature is 90 degrees. What's the plan here? To give the resource room teacher a walkie-talkie and a pair of roller skates?
Each middle school classroom had 3 or 4 high needs special ed students, but no extra support for the classroom teacher. This translated into much of the teachers "teaching" time being used to manage, calm down, and engage the 3 or 4 sped students who needed a lot of 1:1 attention, while the gen ed kids sat there bored to tears, for most of the period, watching, and rolling their eyes. It wasn't pretty. There was a roving special ed teacher that the classroom teacher could call on for help when needed, but the support teacher was rarely available since the entire middle school shared her services. This was not an isolated, one classroom or one teacher scenario. It was common.
I can't imagine that the special ed students needs were being met in that environment, and I know the general ed students needs weren't. There wasn't a whole lot of teaching going on for either group, just a whole lot of classroom management.
But SB is a middle, and upper middle class, predominantly white school. Kids get good test scores, no matter the low quality of teaching they get, so the school flies under the radar. And everyone thinks they and their inclusion model are doing so very well.
By the way I often volunteered in the classroom and saw these things first hand. I also rarely, if ever, saw a spec ed parent volunteering so I have to wonder if they knew what was really going on with their kids in those classrooms, at lunch and on the payground.
People like Anna, always claim that other people's kids are not "well served"... "they" shouldn't be there. The families in the autism programs at Salmon Bay are the most satisfied in the district. That is indisputable. Perhaps Anna knows about the better option, a better program somewhere else. Please tell. ???
Regular kids, well, they just keep lining up at Salmon Bay to get in. It must be serving a lot of them well too or there would not be a mile long waiting list.
The thing is, moving forward, and even now, the district is defunding those programs. Currently the programs are grossly overloaded at Salmon Bay. That's because the district won't open new programs. Is that the fault of the students? Should they just quit, and be homeschooled, move somewhere else? Students with severe disabilities at Salmon Bay have already been dumped without support into the resource room (or rotation), and in only 2 grades. They have no options.
And Charlie's absolutely right about the choice. The district says "here, make a choice". Making a choice that way is completely illegal. Services are supposed to be IEP driven, not driven by a district menu.
Could that be what I witnessed?
Then you say "While there's always been a lot of people who love to complain about Salmon Bay. "
So I guess I'm not alone in my opinion of what was going on there.
Then you say "it is not the fault of the students"?
Who said it was the fault of the students? Not me. Where did you get that from? Or do you just want to pick a fight?
In my opinion it's the fault of the system and the program. Putting 3 or 4 high needs spec ed kids in a 30 kid classroom with one teacher and no support does not work for anyone. Not the teacher. Not the spec ed kids. Not the gen ed kids.
It might work fine if the classroom teacher had in classroom support. It might work fine if there were only one high needs spec ed student in the classroom? I don't know. But what I do know is it didn't work the way it was going. For anyone.
Both as a general ed parent and now as an inclusion parent, I have been impressed with both the general ed and the special ed staff at SB. Yes, sometimes it gets difficult. Guess what - sometimes general ed students get difficult, too. And yes, I've volunteered at the school (and the other schools my kids are at - 3 this year) over time. In fact, Anna, many times the Sp. Ed. parents spend way more hours at the school than many Gen. Ed. parents, because we're sometimes told that our child can't participate in the program unless we're present. I'm not completely sure this is legal, but it happens to me, and to other inclusion parents I know frequently. How many general ed parents are told that in order for their child to participate in a core part of the curriculum as defined by their school (at Salmon Bay say Winter Enrichment or camp) they HAVE to attend? Yes, I know these programs can't go on without parent support, but most parents have a more generalized pressure, not the pressure that their child will have to stay home if they can't take time off from work to attend.
Anna's fears are right on if we're suddenly taking the cohort group of 8 and turning it into a cohort group of 22, however. There's no way for a small team of the special ed teacher, and aides (and no promise on the ratio of aides to students in the ICS model, you'll notice), can keep up with those ratios.
Although you might not like what you saw at SB. I'll point out that by any objective measure it's a very successful school.
The SB programs are overloaded by 2 kids each and the resource room teacher is part time. The resource room kids are picked up by the inclusion staff. If you look at the numbers of special ed kids in the middle school, you will see it's about 80 kids. (Look at the OSPI school report card) That is a lot for 2.5 special education teachers!
That thing about "come and be with your" kid for activity X or they can't participate... is very common all over the district. Yes. Illegal also. Kids with disabilities must be accommodated for ALL school sanctioned activities: field trips, winterfest, after school sports, WASL prep, chess club, everything.
Call me crazy, but as a manager, I have to question any system that causes employees who have 12 weeks of vacation a year to burn out.
If you have employees who get 6 times as much vacation as most people, and they burn out on a regular basis, more often than those other people with a lot less time off, then YOU, as a manager, are doing it wrong.
I never said that a student was ALO or SpEd but not both. I can see how my sentence strcture might have implied that, but that wasn't my intent. I just don't think differentiation scales well to large class sizes. My solution to that is not to get rid of differentiation, but to reduce class sizes.
I have not heard one person, myself included, say that there shouldn't be inclusion. Not one. You can stop arguing that. We get it, and we agree with you.
What we are saying is that inclusion must be done right to be effective. Having a classroom of 30 kids, 4 of which are high needs special ed, and one teacher does not work for anyone. Would you want your sped kid in that class? Do you think he/she would get the services and attention that he/she needed? I don't.
So yes to inclusion, but done right. With reasonable ratios. Do you think 80 special ed kids to 2.5 roving special ed teachers is a decent ratio? Do you really think that is ideal or effective. I doubt you do. And if you do, then go sit in on some SB classes and watch it in action. You may change your mind.
The bottom line is... we will have inclusion, done right or done wrong. The "inclusion" isn't the issue. To my mind, 22:1 is inclusion done wrong. Too bad we are being forced with this change, when we have so much better now.
Perhaps we are all just saying that we have a huge staffing problem. Everything must have good ratio's to be effective, inclusion is not different than anything else. When you have more kids, you will need MORE differentiation, more techniques which are differentiable, not less.
The core of it was that our special ed teachers taught "core" classrooms just like every other teacher in the building. Their classes, of course, had lots of kids with IEPs, but also lots of kids without IEPs -- thus greatly reducing the stigma of being in the "special ed" classroom.
Alas, this turned out to be illegal: special ed teachers cannot teach kids who are not special ed kids, apparently. The district, or whoever is responsible for this policy, seems to want to ensure that stigma is attached to having an IEP. Neither of my kids does, but I still think it stinks: both of them had classes in the "special ed" classrooms before the district put the kibosh on the whole thing, and they had wonderful learning experiences there.
I know there are plausible policy-based reasons for the policy. Something I'm learning more and more every day: sometimes policy is an ass.
Full inclusion is tricky (including ALL learners even those coded 10) but can be done if a teacher nos what they are doing. For LA, Readers/Writers Workshop sets a teacher up for success. The teacher only needs to figure out how to tier mini lessons on a demo text, utilize small group instruction, and individual conferencing to reach those levels. Record keeping can become a nightmare- using notebooks as a record for conversations works great for some. Personally, I use a palm pilot that has a version of the grade program the district uses. I put notes into the palm gradebook which then gets synced up and posted on the Source. Parents can see what interventions the student and I are trying or individual skill work we are doing. The palm is my own tool and not district supported.
Done right, inclusion is obtainable given structures and tools that make it easier to manage the individuation, especially at the middle school level.
lovely- the palm keyboard is a challenge :-)
Eckstein, Ballard HS, Graham Hill, John Hay, Lafayette, Montlake, Salmon Bay, Roosevelt HS. They have the inclusion programs! I don't understand how they can be killing those.
John Hay for one, has better WASL scores for it's disabled students alone than most schools, even better than the so-called "good" schools.
John Hay 4th Grade WASL scores
(disabled only):
93.8%, 75%, 69%
for reading, math, and writing.
These are the scores for 16 disabled kids, 7 of them are autistic in this school's fourth grade cohort. Why would you want to bust that up?
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Fingerpainting anyone?