Posted on 05/27/2008 9:56:32 AM PDT by PercivalWalks
In one case, we reported to the school principal that one of the boys in class was sticking her with a pin during class and to please separate them. NOTHING WAS DONE until the teacher saw the action for herself.
Here's an interesting note. Last year we noticed in the paper where a man of the correct age, and with the same name, was killed in a gang related shooting. Same fellow? I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Back on subject. At home, she does not mind, she yells, she screams,she curses. Her room (she is 32 and still lives with us) is a sty. She has a job, but does no chores unless we just sit on her.
And then again, sometimes she voluntarily does something. She can be extremely sweet, or thoughtlessly cruel, although she isn't violent
Quite frankly, I don't know how she is going to cope when her mother and I are gone. Pray for her.
As a parent of a child on the ASD spectrum, these type of stories naturally strike a chord with me. Fortunately we have a great school system in place.
We have 2-3 IEP’s per school year along with ‘problem solving’ meetings as needed. We are getting ready to transfer our daughter from one program to another (and one building to another as well) within the school system, and the plan is to have one of these meetings every couple of weeks to help her with the transition.
If they were having these meetings odds are this problem likely never would have happened.
Parents must be their child’s advocate. You can refuse to sign the IEP if you feel it is not correct. The parents and teachers also need to be realistic in the placement and goals that are set for the child. You want to push them to be the most they can be, but you also need to balance that with what they can handle as well.
If this had been an ongoing problem, the teacher should have requested a re-evaluation of the IEP.
I hold the teacher completely at fault based upon what this article says. But I also fault the school as well if they did not have a system in place to address when a placement seems to not be working out.
As far as home schooling goes...it is extremely difficult to provide all of the special services a child on the ASD spectrum needs as an individual/family. Also, it is very important for those children to have the example of neuro-typical children. Many things just don’t come naturally and they need lots of examples to understand social conventions among peers.
Very true...this is a result of the "universal service" mandate of public schools. The schools are forced to deal with them and have no other alternatives. Then to compound the problem, if a "normal" kids parents complain, they are labeled as discriminatory. The sad fact is that many of these kids do not belong on mainstream public schools for exactly the reason you mention. This is political correctness run amok...
Some kids are “mainstreamed” and do quite well.
In this case, however, it appears the Special Ed system failed Alex by mainstreaming him.
The teacher may very well have been “out of her element” in dealing with Alex; nonetheless, to point to Alex’s deficit and ridicule him was very mean spirited.
I watched my son get put through hell in Jr High. When the school did nothing to help him and wanted to send him to another school, I acted but in a legal and determined way. And we won! Now he is almost a straight A student in HS!
Home school would further this child's problems.
I agree with you that home schooling is not always the best option, especially for a child with Aspbergers.
The special ed programs in public school systems if often blessed with excellent resources to handle a child with disabilities, much more so than a parent can give.
In my own case with my child (which isn’t nearly as significant as Alex’s), I welcomed the opportunity to have a host of “experts” help my child during her academic day, so that I could be fresh and ready to help her when she came home.
“He’d do better being homeschooled.’
The homeschool crowd battles with atheists for the title of “Who’s the most self-righteous, arrogant, and ignorant crowd of people in American Life.”
I myself prefer a mixture of private and public school so that my children will know what they are up against in the world.
This child would be better served in a private school with a smaller, more forgiving environment. Home school would only make his social skills worsen.
The boy is White, so the media won’t touch this.
Kids with Aspbergers need public or private school education and socialization settings MORE than anything else.
This child will have to learn social interaction, like most with Aspbergers, he’ll learn socialization by memorizing thousands of possible interactions, and the thousands of interactions needed to learn (and memorize) this will only be available in a school setting.
Time to HOMESCHOOL your CHILDREN —
Regardless of whether it was appropriate for the boy to be in the classroom given his special needs, the teacher is a pathetic loser for asking a room full of kindergarteners to vote on how to handle him. She should be fired. She didn’t have the guts to make her own decision about the need to remove him from the class and take responsibility for it, so she arranged to blame the decision on a bunch of 5 year olds instead. She’s a sorry excuse for an adult.
Given her demonstrated incompetence as an adult and a teacher, I have my doubts about how much of the classroom disruption was really attributable to the little boy. He might do fine in a classroom led by a teacher who isn’t a knucklehead.
next you outcast the christians and the republicans and any whose parents are not politically correct.
You slowly force them into homeschooling and then prohibit homeschool students to have access to exams and placement testing.
Thus, only the adherents to the politically correct socialist religion of the public school teachers unions will be allowed advancement in society.
I’m in complete agreement on all counts.
Some homeschool situations I’ve witness border on child abuse. Some parents think there’s no skill or science behind the art of teaching.
Some homeschool situations are fantastic.
But then he’d miss all that special socialization in the schools!
Asperger’s is a rough one. Many kids with this diagnosis are highly intelligent. Special Ed class would likely be an even worse situation. A small gifted and talented program (or home schooling) would probably a better environment. (Do they still have G&T in public education?)
While what the teacher did was stupid and rotten, the larger point is that school outside the home is not appropriate for this child, at least from what is in the article.
Ditto.
Uh, the parents should have realized their child was not ready for this type of school setting and either homeschooled him or . . . he’s only five . . . spend the school year working on figuring out how to help him.
The bottom line is that the parents should have never sent the boy to school in the first place. He was bound to fail, at least socially, and why should he go through that when there are perfectly acceptable and legal alternatives?
Yes, the teacher is reprehensible. But the parents knew the boy would not be able to function successfully in this setting and they are the first people who are to be safeguarding the best interests of their child.
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