This is sooooooo fucked up
Also a sobering reminder that this society may not be the best place to bring new children into. I would be beyond irate if that had been my child.
ಠ_ಠ
this is Texas brand cruelty
real men thrive on pain
Okay I’m not defending the teacher here except for the child’s right to be recognized and have their needs tended to. This also isn’t about “good” and “bad” teachers, but the education system. This is anecdotal, so take it for what it’s worth.
My wife, S, is an intervention specialist which is a teacher in a special ed classroom. I think she is a very good teacher, and after years in a underfunded inner city school, she now works in a very large well funded elementary school in a nice area with very involved and stable parents, by and large.
She has a student, L who is non verbal, most of her kids are and she has the most difficult special-ed classroom in her school. She works on a team with two other intervention specialists, one of which, B, was L’s teacher for two years previous. L has a muscular disability.
It’s S’s first year at this school so she is just starting to know the kids. What she is discovering is that these “very low” non verbal children, have basically received no prior schooling on subjects. Their learning plans have each of them marked very low, with the most basic goals. And granted, behavior is usually an issue with these kids who can’t communicate. They can lash out suddenly and scratch or bite a teacher or aide, drawing blood more often than not. So behavior will eat up a ton of bandwidth for any teacher. It took my wife months to get her kids to sit with her and do any work whatsoever. But once they started to do work for her so she could test their ability, she discovers that they are all quite advanced in various areas, despite basically never being taught. Kids with educational goals of being able to count to 5 can do multiplication and division for 2 and 3 digit numbers, ahead of their grade; kids who seem to have no concept of reading or conceptual language can spell and construct sentences or answer questions about a story, if it is shown to them in a way that they will interact with.
Back to L, he is another case just like this. Very difficult to work with at first, refused to be taught, lashes out violently when he gets frustrated, but now that he is used to her he will sit and work and also demonstrates advanced ability in multiple subjects.
However the last to years his previous teacher and the head of their team, B, by all accounts from teacher and aides did nothing with him for 2 years. He was basically laid on a mat in a closet, and ignored, everyday for 2 years. My wife says that for the most part he gets around in her class pretty darn well, so even the assumption that he’s mostly immobile was wrong.
Special ed teachers spend most of their time some weeks filling out complicated ed plans that are a state requirement, but frankly no one ever checks or even seems to know how to fill these things out. Everyone is just winging it. Bureaucracy is a stand in for education and the needs of the child. Imo my wife is an exceptional teacher who has time and time again achieved breakthroughs with some of her most difficult students. The lead on her team, with over a decade of experience in this job couldn’t even see past their own assumptions about the child, and never stopped to question them, and so the poor kid was neglected, uninjured thank God, for 2 years.
So if a pretty good teacher at a good school can fuck up that badly, how dangerous would it be for a inexperienced or disengaged teacher? To me this isn’t a problem that comes down to individual teachers but of the American education system as a whole, and it’s priorities. Spoiler alert, politics matter more than children.
if this happened to my kids i would be writing a manifesto
This is staff not knowing the individual kid, and their unique behaviors very well. So they just follow standard protocols. This one is called Planned Ignoring. It’s effective when someone is looking for a reaction from staff. But if you don’t know the kid well enough, you’ll miss the subtle and individual signs that something real is going on. Learning those signs can only come with experiance with this individual kid.
That’s complete horseshit. Staff would have absolutely known he was nonverbal. The kid was crying for two hours. There’s nothing fucking subtle about any of this.
I have a non verbal child. There is no fucking protocol that says to leave a kid on the ground for two hours crying. What are you smoking?
Having a non verbal child does not make you an expert in protocols.
Here’s actually an article on how it may not be an effective strategy for autistic children:
https://learnplaythrive.com/rethinking-planned-ignoring-for-kids-on-the-spectrum/
did you just say someone who has a child with autism…doesn’t know their child? you ok?
If you know one child with autism, you know one child with autism. Like all individuals, they are incredibly varied and the range of things they will do to gain or avoid attention is vast.
Okay. Find me a human being who won’t scream for hours when you snap their femur.
The femur is the thickest and largest bone in the body. When it snaps, everyone around you knows. Every breath a scream.
Now, please defend ignoring a child screaming at the top of their lungs with every breath for two hours by saying something more about personalities and wanting attention.
I visit classrooms where children frequently scream with every breath for long periods of time. I also see children who plop to the floor many many times per day without “shattering a femur”. We don’t know if these behaviors were common for this child. We don’t know if the staff knew the child well enough to know if these were common behaviors for him. There is more to this story than the article presents and the use of the word shattered feels like clickbait language to me.
ETA- Special ed is almost always understaffed. In Texas right now we have a governor who is attacking public education by withholding funding in an attempt to get his school voucher bill passed. We are seeing a big increase in students with high needs at a time when everyone is underfunded. It’s creating an incredibly stressful environment and we are losing teachers and paraprofessionals daily. We have many classes being run on a shoestring staff with substitute help when we can get it. It sucks. It sucks to see your co-workers emotionally and physically abused. It sucks to see great teachers leave because they can’t take it anymore. It sucks to see kids who need more and to know that their chance of getting a trained qualified special ed teacher this year is slim. It sucks every single fucking day.
Nobody, child or otherwise, can scream for two hours straight comfortably. If a child is crying for that long unabated, there’s a bloody reason. Yes, you see children plop to the floor without breaking a femur all the time, and the sound of a femur breaking is absent in those times.
I know that education is underfunded, special education especially so. Probably more than doubly. I know that good people are ground down and out by the system when all they wanted to do was help kids learn. And I have also witnessed childcare staff more interested in their nails than the welfare of the children they’re supposedly responsible for.
Look, I’m not as emotional about this coming back after a few days and I might have just blocked that other guy because I couldn’t deal with the frustration on top of the nausea I was fighting at the time. I understand where you’re coming from. You’re fighty because you’re defending the good people you’ve seen beaten up and down by the terrible system we have in place, and I’m fighty because I’m defending little me who was frequently ignored for hours by my alleged guardians because I couldn’t communicate what was wrong and they - what, didn’t know how to troubleshoot? Call the doctor? 🤷♀️
So I understand why so many are coming to the defense of the staff, but I vehemently disagree. Those staff were still responsible for the welfare of all those children, this little boy included, and they failed him. But I want to be clear: I don’t believe in executing your generals just 'cause they lose a battle. Holding someone accountable doesn’t mean pillorying them in the public square. There is one defense, which doesn’t absolve them of anything but it is a defense: taking from it how to stop it from happening again. I have a lot more sympathy for people who care to learn from their mistakes.
Anyway, I appreciate you taking the time to read this. I am very good friends with a lot of teachers, and they all stress about not being able to provide help to one of their students needing it. But not one of them would leave a child crying on the floor for two hours without having checked for injuries or called for help, long before that time was up.
For anyone wondering, this is what those staff ignored for two hours (WARNING: this may well trigger you, it sure as fuck ruined my day): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx4in4UpdWE
This video is 43 seconds long. You hear that sound out of a little kid’s leg, followed by the screaming for two hours, and don’t immediately call the ambulance, you’re not a reasonable adult. You’re an inhuman monster. Anyone saying “well maybe they thought he was just acting out” is ignoring the basic facts of the case so they can be contrary on the Internet.
While I’m not nonverbal I also broke my femur as a child, in specific I was around 6-7. Father ignored my cries of pain for probably around half an hour to an hour (I “saw” the sun jump in the sky) before eventually getting fed up with me. He roughly picked me up, tossed me over his shoulder (again ignoring my cries of pain), took me into the house and more or less thew me onto the floor. Walked off all pisses and my mom came in to see why I was so… distressed. My leg was about twice as large as normal, I was going/well into shock. Ambulance and whatnot got called, the Fire dudes showed up, gave me some sort of shot and awhile later the Ambulance dudes eventually showed up. Dad rode with me to the hospital and to keep things short he felt pretty terrible about himself for good reason.
Course that experience didn’t prevent him from being abusive later on but I can understand why he initially chose to ignore me, I was and still am rather emotional. Same kind of deal with this poor kid. I can understand ignoring at first, but there comes a point, hopefully quite quickly that you check in and see if things are alright. I push fuckn carts and I check in with old people all the time. Quite often they are just old and are being weird staring into space, looking confused whatever old people get up to but occasionally they need help and I’m glad to have asked. If your job is to take care of kids with special needs you should be very aware of their typical behavior and check in when there’s something off. Doubly so when there’s any sort of communication difficulties christ
