Changing Schools

All of you know that I was diagnosed with a learning disability in middle school. Without the extra help that I received, I am not sure that I would have ever graded from high school. With that being said, I think the government needs to be careful that our schools remain a place for general education and not a glorified come one come all service. I am going to try to be careful as I say this because in no means do I want to offend anyone. I believe special education has its place and think there should be schools set aside for severely profound students. I am sure there is plenty of research to say that I am wrong and these students should be in the general populace of the students at our schools. From my limited interactions, the teachers in our special education department work very hard, but their classes are mixed with different special needs. How are they to help all of the students that they have when they cannot specialize to help their specific needs? Last year, I had an autistic student. I loved him to death, but there is not one thing that my class did for him in an education setting. His paraprofessional pretty much took the tests for him. He was never able to edit a piece of video or to run a video camera. I believe if we are not careful, the general ed. students begin to suffer due to the modifications I had to make for him. It slowed the class down so much that we didn't get as much done in that class. I will finish it with a thought I had from last night. I had to chaperone prom. Early on before most of the students arrived, a severely profound student was dropped off by her parents. My first thoughts were, "How sweet!". She looked beautiful. She had a nice dress on and I thought "She must be having the time of her life." As the next hour and a half to two hours went by, I kept noticing the special ed. teacher pacing her back and forth through the main hall. She screamed at times and the teacher kept saying, "They know she can't stand loud noises and music." I don't know what this little girl was thinking in her head, but do we truly believe she was having a good time? On one of the videos we were watching at NTI this summer, one of the most profound statements I had ever heard that probably changed my life not only as a teacher, but also as a parent, he said, "Fair is not getting everything equal. Fair is getting what YOU need." I am not sure as a school system we were fair to that little girl. I still don't believe she got what she needed.