Update June 17 2006: I just found another blog talking about the same thing. Autistic Conjecture of the Day reflects on the realities in her district (like Dick Dalton, she is both a teacher and the parent of a child(ren) of children in special ed).
I am a teacher in the one and only district in our county. While not currently a special ed teacher, I work with "at-risk" students, virtually all of whom have special needs when it comes to learning. As with any school district, funds are limited, and "strategies" have been developed to determine who can get services, and who cannot.
This has especially upset me in recent times, when I discovered one of these strategies. We receive a large number of students each year, primarily because of our transient populations. Students often have qualified for special education in other districts. Once they come to us, they suddenly don't need it anymore. Why? Because we set a lower standard. We only service those falling into a lower percentile than some districts.
Update June 15 2006 : Dr. Jan writes:
Today, my boss asked me to remove the link from my school web site (I am the web master there... or should I say web mistress?). Apparently, some of the things I have written have hit a raw nerve or two. I volunteered to take it down because... there's nothing I have written that is not true and cannot be documented through numerous cross sources; and I love my district and would do nothing to intentionally harm or malign it.
Dr. Jan is a elementary school principal in Oklahoma. She posts a despairing comment on the availablility of services to students in her district, and describes how her district is blocking access to testing. It is no wonder parents are frustrated. Link: Dr. Jan's Blog: Serenity.
The Special Education Law Blog has a category: Schools Behaving Badly. Maybe Charles Fox should get on the case.
This year has been the most horrifying experience of my career as special education administration (law and policy) has made an attempt to ignore students with serious handicaps who have definite and easy-to-document need for services by simply failing to acknowledge they exist by failing to provide testing (and/or services) to these students.
The way to do this is to make the process leading to testing so difficult to attain that no one gets to the testing arena unless the psychologist in charge of making the decision to test takes pity on the teachers/students. In the case of my own school, there was no such pity.
It's no wonder parents pay for Independent Evaluations out of their own pockets, when they can afford it. It's no wonder that there's a demographic skew in the numbers of kids with LDs going on to college.
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