Two Government High School Teacher Assistant Horror Stories

Toogood Reports ^ | April 30, 2003 | Bernard Chapin

[Starmaker]

In the nine years that I´ve worked in the public schools I´ve had a great variety of experiences and many of them have been quite positive. I have seen many a student graduate from high school who we initially thought never would. I´ve also seen teachers who were so dedicated to their students that they tutored them in their spare time at public libraries and cried over their poor performance during meetings. Generally, the people that I´ve worked with, regardless of educational or intellectual limitations, have had a sincere affection for the students we instruct and have wanted the best for them in life. However, two recent situations that occurred at my school were so grievous that I thought I would record them for posterity. One of our teachers, Phil, seconded it, saying that I “might as well speak the truth as, in these cases, it is weirder than fiction.”

As a bit of background, I work at a largely special education high school and special education programs have unique characteristics that those of us who graduated from regular high school curriculums may not recognize. The currently 12% of special education students in America have brought with them a great many demographic changes in our schools. Since 1975, when the federal mandate for it commenced, a huge number of school service personnel entered the schools who were not present previously.

School psychologists and school social workers are an example of employees who were far less prevalent before the whirlwind of individualized programming began in the seventies. Another group, the paraprofessionals, once known as teacher´s aides, are also now an ever-present and standard part of the special education classroom. This is true for a couple of reasons but the most important is that special education is controlled by the particular state´s interpretation of federal legislation and, in Illinois, as in most other states, paraprofessionals can provide for a more flexible type of classroom size. The State of Illinois dictates to the schools the maximum number of students allowable in each type of special education classroom. The overall number of students permissible increases if a classroom paraprofessional is present as an additional support member.

The presence of the paraprofessional makes classrooms more productive for the school´s administration as they can accommodate more students that were formerly part of regular education within each specialized school or age-based space. Unfortunately, “paraprofessional” is a very badly paid position with many of our twenty year veterans not making much over twenty thousand dollars a year. It is very hard to find high functioning people to fill these positions at the a beginning wage of 14 grand a year. Although, the requirements to be a special education aide are not stringent. At one time all that was needed to be a special education paraprofessional (as opposed to a regular education paraprofessional) was a high school diploma. This is no longer the case as the state is now taking a more active role in their certification and insisting that a certain amount of hours of post-high school courses be completed as a prerequisite for the position. We are offering extra classes to our current paraprofessionals for free as a means to help them gain certification under then new guidelines.

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[Pukka Puck]

Took too long to get interesting so I didn't bother clicking on the link.

[FreeRadical]

I went ahead and skimmed it.

It is just another account of the crap that goes on in our schools. Seems a hottie chick eduwanker was selling weed to kids and some other substitute scum was smoking weed in school.

Basically nothing more than another day in the Dumb our Kids Down Jihad.

[Pukka Puck]

We homeschooled our daughter.

She started college at fifteen. So far, 4.0 GPA.

[TigersEye]

This article was written by a teacher? Judging by the punctuation, grammar and syntax this person is about as much use to those students as Mr. D or Miss Y.

I also just love the fact that these unaccredited high school graduate paraph&ckup teachers assistants get to bypass the metal detecters and body searches while the minor charges of the school system have to submit to the probing and fondling.