I haven't been able to write for awhile, because I've been buried with back-to-school after-the-strike rebuild and recovery efforts. That is, I've been trying to teach. It hasn't been very pleasant. Well, the teaching part has, because I love the kids, I love teaching, and our new bunch of students is just delightful. I'm really thrilled with this year's batch of Resource Grade Tens. That aside, the rest of it...the part where I'm not teaching... has been pretty demoralizing. In fact, going back to school in general, has been pretty demoralizing. Morale is extremely low. We went on strike for the kids, we held the line to make things better for the kids, we gave up a fair whack of money for the kids, and yet, things are worse. Not just the same. Worse.
One of my jobs is to handle the paperwork for all of the Category D designations. Category D, is "Chronic Health". The whole point of the designations, is to identify students who require extra assistance in order to be successful in school. They might need some specialized equipment. They might need EA time. Maybe they need a scribe, or a specialised type of teaching, or maybe they just need to have some learning support class time. Depending upon why they have specialised needs, they are assigned a different category. Category A, for example, is called, "Dependent Handicapped." Category Q is for kids who are "Learning Disabled". Category H is for students with "Severe Behaviour Disorders/Severe Mental Illness".
These categories are attached to money. In addition to the paltry sum provided by the education ministry in this province to educate children, kids with a category may or may not bring in extra money to the school, to finance providing for their needs. The amount for the most severely affected children, those who are either Dependent Handicapped or both Deaf and Blind, roughly equals what it costs to pay for a single EA. Sounds reasonable, right?
Except that since we've been back, it looks to me like more and more kids are having their designations either downgraded, or removed. And that means, there is no funding for their special needs anymore.
I can't prove this; it may just be where I work, though other teachers I talk with say they notice the same thing. And it's pretty disturbing.
For example, I know of one situation in the province, I won't say where, in which a student with chronic pain and a history of seizures has lost their Chronic Health designation. This student continues to be affected by the damage caused by the seizures, and by the pain that won't allow sitting down for more than a few minutes, yet that student is no longer identified as one with these special needs. This kind of thing isn't new; it's been creeping up for awhile. There are students losing their 'Dependent Handicapped' designation on the basis that they can feed themselves, because they were seen eating a candy bar. The fact that such a student continues to require daily toileting, is unable to stand, walk, dress himself, lift a spoon to his mouth, open a book or write independently, is not enough. Being able to get a candy bar into one's mouth is apparently a criterion which establishes that you are not Dependent Handicapped.
These are a couple of examples of what is happening in schools right now. Funding has become so tight that children with obvious needs are having their support funds either reduced or removed altogether. There are countless examples of children with learning disabilities recognized by qualified psychologists, who are not considered to have learning disabilities by the BC Ministry of Education. This no longer matters, of course, because the Ministry removed all funding for students with LD anyway, but back when specialists were still funded for these kids, the qualifying features became narrower and narrower.
Another thing I'm noticing is enlarged classes. There is a class I know of, right now, with twenty five teenagers across three grades enrolled, and all of them are either identified as having special needs, or they should be. Not one is a typical learner. How can I be sure? Because the class is a learning support class. You can only enroll if the School Based Team identifies you as having some sort of high need. And yet, somewhere, somebody thinks it is reasonable to have twenty five high needs, generally emotionally fragile, challenged and often acting out teens in a single class, where they are supposed to receive extra help.
Why? Why does there seem to be a trend towards decategorization? Why would anyone form a class like the one described above? Aside from the obvious predilection of our current provincial government for under resourcing public schooling in their push to privatize all the things, why are we seeing this happen?
Given that the Ministry of Ed is very interested in removal of categories altogether, it seems likely that we will be seeing fewer and fewer children identified as having special needs, and therefore as requiring additional funding. While the Ministry would have you believe that this is to facilitate individualised learning for every child, I do not think there is any evidence to suggest that BC's Ministry of Education has either the will or the capacity to undertake such a move. Instead, I think the reasoning is simple: Undesignated children cannot be counted. Nobody can say, with ease, that there are "ten special needs children" in a given class. Once they are not identified, these children will be statistically invisible. And we all know what happens to people who don't statistically exist.
It certainly won't be an increase in services.
Showing posts with label designation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label designation. Show all posts
Saturday, October 4, 2014
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Talk at Tricities Youth Rally
Here is what I had to say on September 7th at the Tricities Youth Rally in Coquitlam. I was asked to provide information and perspective on some of the impacts of cuts to education in British Columbia. I'm not very slick with Blogger yet, so please excuse the poor formatting until I work out how to get it right.
The beginning of the talk was cut off, so I'll just let you know that I began by saying that my purple hair is in honour of my status as an endangered species: a British Columbia Special Education Teacher.
Saturday, August 30, 2014
The Terrible Trajectory of the Undesignated BC Child
There was an article published in the Vancouver Sun, detailing the odyssey of BC mother and teacher Lori Drysdale's search for services for her son with Non Verbal Learning Disabilities. The article was largely accurate, but there is a serious discussion underlying Lori's story, which needs to be addressed.
Minister Fassbender has decided that because about 10% of all BC students were identified as having special needs last year, there are 10% of students in BC schools who have special needs. This is like saying, "because I see only white cars parked on my street, all cars are white." In fact, the number of special needs students in our schools is a great deal higher than 10%, and I will tell you why.
First, waiting lists to get formally identified are very long. In one inner city school I worked at, we accessed about three to five assessments per year. By the end of September, the children on the, 'urgent' list, numbered about twenty five. As a result, at best, in any given year, one fifth of students who urgently needed assessment would receive it. Many a student languished on these lists throughout their elementary school career, and some never received assessment. Assessment is necessary for a child to be, 'identified' or 'designated', and thereby, funded. So children who had urgent need for funding, did not even get diagnosed, never mind provided the services they deserved.
Second, because teachers know about this, they realize that only children with the most dire needs will be assessed. There is no point at all, in putting a child on the assessment list if his need is 'only' severe. He won't receive assessment. The teacher, therefore, will not receive the information about how his brain works, that would facilitate her tailoring her instruction to his needs. The parent will not be told what, exactly, is making things hard for his child. And the child himself, will often believe that his problem is simply that he is, 'stupid', a notion regularly reinforced by his peers.
The teachers, of course, will move heaven and earth to help the child anyway. But without funding, without Educational Assistants and with massive classes, the unidentified child will often fall into the abyss of not really understanding, trying to cope, and becoming increasingly frustrated and angry. Imagine, if you were forced to sit in a PhD level biophysics class, or a PhD level neuropsychology seminar. You would be told to listen, contribute, read the relevant material and speak and write intelligently about what you read and heard. How would you respond? The lesson lasts for five hours, with a break for lunch. Would you be able to pay close attention, and meet the standards of the class? Most people wouldn't. And most people would quit, act out, or do something else to keep themselves busy. Which is exactly what happens to the unfunded LD child....day, after day, after day, after day......
Eventually, of course, this makes him angry. Me, I'd've been angry within about half an hour, but many LD children in this situation will go on for years without throwing bricks through the plate glass. People with Learning Disabilities are some of the bravest and strongest people I know. However, eventually, they will flip their gourds, and rightly so. When this happens, they finally get their diagnosis. But their diagnosis is not for LD, it's for.....Behaviour/Mental illness.
Behaviour and Mental Illness are inextricably linked as single categories, according to the BC Ministry of Education. There is Category R, Mild to Moderate Behaviour/Mental Illness. That's how you are assigned if you are acting out but you don't have two agencies beyond the school, involved in your care. Only if you can get into enough trouble to have two (also profoundly underfunded and overworked) agencies involved, do you rate Category H, Severe Behaviour/Mental Illness. Category R isn't funded. Category H, gets you the lowest available funding.
Of course, if you are no longer attending school, which by now is often the case, you won't get any help at all, because your underlying problem, a Learning Disability, has never been acknowledged. All you know at this point, is that you are widely viewed as stupid and lazy. You are well aware that you can't keep up in school, so you don't go. It really, really hurts to be seen as stupid, so you need to find a way to get rid of the constant, gnawing, emotional pain. You also need somebody, anybody, to accept and value you. So you fall in with other disenfranchised kids, who offer you ways to numb your pain: drugs, alcohol, cutting, eating disorders...anything to give you a sense that you are in control of your life. If you have the misfortune to become addicted, you sometimes end up finding a way to finance your addiction that is not entirely legal. When you get caught at these activities, you end up in my husband's prison school class. He tells me that essentially all of his students are struggling with one learning impairment or another, most have addictions, and many have English as a Second Language.
So Lori Drysdale, who as a teacher, likely knew about this trajectory our Government has chosen for our children with Learning Disabilities, decided to go the private school route. So did I, with my daughter who has the same diagnosis. But Lori gave up her house to make that happen. I gave up an extremely good job to move, to make that happen. For Lori, it has helped her son, but for my child, it did not. I will talk about why in another blog. Suffice it to say, Private school may help some, but it most definitely is not the answer for all, or even most children with learning disabilities.
Mr. Fassbender, who is lamentably unfamiliar with the issues in his Education Portfolio, and woefully uneducated in how to assess the literature on the topic, needs to understand that 10% doesn't begin to touch the students who need special educational intervention. What is sad, is that there are reasonable ways to address these needs, and we've known about many of them for my entire thirty five year career as a special educator, but until people like Mr. Fassbender decide to ask people who know what they're doing, without a funding agenda, the conversation about genuinely positive educational reform will never happen. So meanwhile, we fight our contract battles to try to assuage the terrible, terrible needs that, daily, we see unmet.
The true miracle of learning disabilities, is the astonishing number of children who do make it through to become functional citizens. They cope, and some thrive, but the wounds create scars that never disappear. And if you really need a financial reason to care about this, consider that for every dollar spent on providing a good education, seven to eight are saved in corrections costs.
Minister Fassbender has decided that because about 10% of all BC students were identified as having special needs last year, there are 10% of students in BC schools who have special needs. This is like saying, "because I see only white cars parked on my street, all cars are white." In fact, the number of special needs students in our schools is a great deal higher than 10%, and I will tell you why.
First, waiting lists to get formally identified are very long. In one inner city school I worked at, we accessed about three to five assessments per year. By the end of September, the children on the, 'urgent' list, numbered about twenty five. As a result, at best, in any given year, one fifth of students who urgently needed assessment would receive it. Many a student languished on these lists throughout their elementary school career, and some never received assessment. Assessment is necessary for a child to be, 'identified' or 'designated', and thereby, funded. So children who had urgent need for funding, did not even get diagnosed, never mind provided the services they deserved.
Second, because teachers know about this, they realize that only children with the most dire needs will be assessed. There is no point at all, in putting a child on the assessment list if his need is 'only' severe. He won't receive assessment. The teacher, therefore, will not receive the information about how his brain works, that would facilitate her tailoring her instruction to his needs. The parent will not be told what, exactly, is making things hard for his child. And the child himself, will often believe that his problem is simply that he is, 'stupid', a notion regularly reinforced by his peers.
The teachers, of course, will move heaven and earth to help the child anyway. But without funding, without Educational Assistants and with massive classes, the unidentified child will often fall into the abyss of not really understanding, trying to cope, and becoming increasingly frustrated and angry. Imagine, if you were forced to sit in a PhD level biophysics class, or a PhD level neuropsychology seminar. You would be told to listen, contribute, read the relevant material and speak and write intelligently about what you read and heard. How would you respond? The lesson lasts for five hours, with a break for lunch. Would you be able to pay close attention, and meet the standards of the class? Most people wouldn't. And most people would quit, act out, or do something else to keep themselves busy. Which is exactly what happens to the unfunded LD child....day, after day, after day, after day......
Eventually, of course, this makes him angry. Me, I'd've been angry within about half an hour, but many LD children in this situation will go on for years without throwing bricks through the plate glass. People with Learning Disabilities are some of the bravest and strongest people I know. However, eventually, they will flip their gourds, and rightly so. When this happens, they finally get their diagnosis. But their diagnosis is not for LD, it's for.....Behaviour/Mental illness.
Behaviour and Mental Illness are inextricably linked as single categories, according to the BC Ministry of Education. There is Category R, Mild to Moderate Behaviour/Mental Illness. That's how you are assigned if you are acting out but you don't have two agencies beyond the school, involved in your care. Only if you can get into enough trouble to have two (also profoundly underfunded and overworked) agencies involved, do you rate Category H, Severe Behaviour/Mental Illness. Category R isn't funded. Category H, gets you the lowest available funding.
Of course, if you are no longer attending school, which by now is often the case, you won't get any help at all, because your underlying problem, a Learning Disability, has never been acknowledged. All you know at this point, is that you are widely viewed as stupid and lazy. You are well aware that you can't keep up in school, so you don't go. It really, really hurts to be seen as stupid, so you need to find a way to get rid of the constant, gnawing, emotional pain. You also need somebody, anybody, to accept and value you. So you fall in with other disenfranchised kids, who offer you ways to numb your pain: drugs, alcohol, cutting, eating disorders...anything to give you a sense that you are in control of your life. If you have the misfortune to become addicted, you sometimes end up finding a way to finance your addiction that is not entirely legal. When you get caught at these activities, you end up in my husband's prison school class. He tells me that essentially all of his students are struggling with one learning impairment or another, most have addictions, and many have English as a Second Language.
So Lori Drysdale, who as a teacher, likely knew about this trajectory our Government has chosen for our children with Learning Disabilities, decided to go the private school route. So did I, with my daughter who has the same diagnosis. But Lori gave up her house to make that happen. I gave up an extremely good job to move, to make that happen. For Lori, it has helped her son, but for my child, it did not. I will talk about why in another blog. Suffice it to say, Private school may help some, but it most definitely is not the answer for all, or even most children with learning disabilities.
Mr. Fassbender, who is lamentably unfamiliar with the issues in his Education Portfolio, and woefully uneducated in how to assess the literature on the topic, needs to understand that 10% doesn't begin to touch the students who need special educational intervention. What is sad, is that there are reasonable ways to address these needs, and we've known about many of them for my entire thirty five year career as a special educator, but until people like Mr. Fassbender decide to ask people who know what they're doing, without a funding agenda, the conversation about genuinely positive educational reform will never happen. So meanwhile, we fight our contract battles to try to assuage the terrible, terrible needs that, daily, we see unmet.
The true miracle of learning disabilities, is the astonishing number of children who do make it through to become functional citizens. They cope, and some thrive, but the wounds create scars that never disappear. And if you really need a financial reason to care about this, consider that for every dollar spent on providing a good education, seven to eight are saved in corrections costs.
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