Viscount
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- Posted: Sat, 26 Apr 2014 01:06:22 +0000
David2074
Possibly I wasn't clear. He wasn't mainstreamed and the teacher was a sped teacher.
But around where I live the SPEDS are not in separate schools. They are in special classrooms within a school. This is likely due to funding but also because to the extent possible they mainstream them. So for example, one kid I worked with (I did some subbing as teacher's aide back when I was doing sign language interpreting) they had me escort him to his wood shop class. He had to have adult supervision and I think they limited his projects some but he still got to go to class with the "normal" kids. Others, like the biter monster I mentioned spent all their time in the sped room. The exception being some of them got to go to the cafeteria at lunch where they all sat at the same table with their teacher. One guy I worked with ate lunch in the room because he was paraplegic and functionally almost quadriplegic. Another girl was nice but appeared to have zero short term memory. If you walked into the room she would greet you and ask your name. If you left the room and came back in you were a new person to her and she would do it all over again.
So - main stream school but SPED section of it and the kids mostly were all kept to the sped section except for a limited mainstream for a few higher functioning ones. This group was all pretty low functioning given that SPED can refer to much, much higher functioning kids like kids with dyslexia or a bit of asperger's who have enough problems to have an IEP but on the whole are more or less "normal". (Whatever normal is these days - lol)
That sounds about right for most high schools. I apologize for my misunderstanding; I saw "mainstream high school" just before that sentence and took your sentence to imply it was a mainstreamed classroom.
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PS, thanks for the link about MA restraints and such.
While it helps, I don't see it protecting teachers from lawsuits much. For example, people quibble over things like whether -=
"student’s behavior poses a threat of imminent, serious physical harm to him or herself or to others" or whether
"all non-physical interventions would be ineffective"
Which is yet another issue that keeps coming up. "Teachers need to keep kids safe" but "teachers shouldn't be able to lay a hand on a student," well, what the hell do I do if a student pulls out scissors and starts ganking kids? Obviously, I subdue the kid, but then I get in trouble for doing the right thing. Parents can be such a pain in the a**. "STABBING IS HOW HE SAYS HI!"
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Anyway, according to those rules in their state I would have been a criminal. I was not specially trained for restraining students and I did put the kid in seclusion. On the other hand I do have common sense. All I did was kind of 'bear hug' him from behind to pin down his arms and hold him back - then move him across the room into the built in time out room (roughly 10 x 10). The alternative was to sit and watch the teacher get attacked. There were a couple of other teachers / aides in the room but I was the closest. Some other certified person might have eventually stopped the kid but probably not before the teacher had a serious injury and maybe a scar. He appeared to be going for her neck.
I have a friend who has had that happen to her three or four times, and she's not a very big person to begin with, so it's not difficult for a high school boy to subdue her. She's an Aide, so she hasn't finished her SPED training and isn't allowed to use restraints, but has been lucky so far that applying them in these situations hasn't gone south for her. I've heard people say "Well, that's why they get paid extra." $10grand a year does not justify having your life in the hands of your students.
