My son sent me this video last night while I was asleep. He found it on youtube. He was bullied by teachers in elementary school as well, only he was more verbal than this child. We’ve heard many other stories on DKOS from kids who were bullied and parents of kids who were bullied not only by other students, but by teachers as well. Some of you have said that the kids should deal with it, that parents should fight while their kids are in the system and change it rather than home school. This man is a single father of an autistic child. He likely doesn’t have the option of home schooling due to working himself.
Video and more beneath the jump.
This father is trying to fight to change the school from the inside, and this video not only shows what happened, but what he, and we are up against. He only has audio of one day, of verbal abuse and humiliation from his son’s teachers and aids. I have to wonder what else happened over the six months prior to this before he put a wire on his son to catch them. What happened to Aiken and what happened to the other autistic mostly non-verbal kids in his class.
More and more stories like these are coming forward as technology enables parents to discover what goes on inside these classrooms. Yes, there are some VERY good teachers out there, my son has had the privilege of having a few of them, and I am in no way disparaging the good teachers. But those teachers need to help the parents whose children are victimized by the rest. Administrations want to hush it up, to quiet it, so they don’t get sued. They move teachers around into positions they aren’t trained to handle, and when abuse inevitably occurs they just move them again. They resist parents efforts to move kids to appropriate classrooms because those classrooms aren’t in their school. Schools need to be about the kids, not about the money.
If you want to see proof of the widespread issues going on in special needs classroom, there’s an organization called Our Children Left Behind which has a list of some of the news stories from across the country. Some of the things on that list are police actions, some are teachers. But I have to wonder even with the police actions, what happened to cause the melt down in the first place? Was there a pattern of verbal abuse, of driving the kid into melt downs, especially where there were multiple police involvement over tantrums?
In fourth grade my son was doing well enough in his self-contained classroom that they asked permission to move him up a step, into a class room run more similarly to a mainstream room. His teacher agreed that he was doing well and that it was a good step for him. So we agreed to the move. He was there for two weeks, and everything changed. Suddenly he was doing nothing in class, he was aggressive, having melt downs, they were sending his school work home because they couldn’t get him to do anything. He was finishing his work in about an hour at home once we got him calmed down enough to focus on it. Behavioral problems increased at home as well. He couldn’t tell us what was going on, he was too aggravated every time it was brought up. I called the school’s behavioralist. She observed the class for one day, well, half a day, and immediately pulled him out and put him back in his old classroom. I still don’t know what was going on in that classroom. The fact that she pulled him out so quickly tells me that I was right to be worried, something was wrong. But I never got an answer other than “it wasn’t a good fit”. So what were they covering up?
Even after he was placed back with the old teacher, one he trusted, he was still not the same. He never got back to where he was before he switched classes, from those two weeks in the other environment, not in the rest of fourth or fifth grades. His teacher was as baffled as I was. His behaviors stayed unstable and more aggressive until I finally pulled him out to homeschool him before sixth grade. Even so it was a year until I could get him to focus and really move ahead, a year of “de-schooling” to get him to want to learn again. All that progress destroyed by two weeks in a classroom in which I don’t know what happened to my son. He won’t talk about it. The school wouldn’t talk about it. Something however was very wrong.
We’ve talked about the option of him trying public school at times. We’ve talked about being able to make friends, now that he has a better idea what friends are and his social skills have improved. We’ve talked about ways he could deal with his sensory issues. But he’s too afraid to try it. He’s afraid to go to public school. He’s afraid of the teachers, and he’s afraid of student bullies as well. He’s afraid he’d fall behind and not be able to keep up because of having to deal with all of that. So we’re going to continue to home school through 12th grade. He is looking forward to college though. He met my college professors; even spoke in one of my classes about his autism and what it’s like to be him. But I’m planning on guiding him towards a smaller school like mine was, rather than a large campus, at least at first. I don’t want him to get overwhelmed and become afraid again, I don’t want his only option to be online college courses.
Once that trust is broken, both for the child and the parents, it’s very hard to build it again. And if a child doesn’t trust you, they don’t learn from you. If a child is afraid to go to school, they don’t learn. If a child is afraid of the teachers, they won’t learn. If a parent has the ability to home school after that trust has been broken, after the child is afraid and not learning and being in school is tantamount to torture, then that is their decision to make. And it doesn’t matter if they are conservative or progressive, religious or atheist. NO ONE should be telling them that they are abandoning the school and not doing right by their community. They are doing right by their child. Denying that child the ability to grow up and become part of the community because they are too afraid to learn that would be not doing right by the community. No one, conservative or progressive or anywhere between has any right to judge them for it. Sometimes you cannot change the school from within, not without sacrificing a child’s education and well being. Every child and every child's future is important and none of them should be sacrificed on the alter of public education, either through abuse, bullying, or lack of learning. We need to speak out against the abuses that happen in public schools, we need to expose the bullying students, teachers, and administrations. Until we do, the most vulnerable of us will suffer.
9:09 AM PT: Change.org has a petition up for legislation to allow the firing of bullying teacher(s). Thanks to Kerplunk for the link!
http://www.change.org/...