I've got 5 siblings who've been in "special education" or "behavioral" classes of varying flavors

and I have...thoughts

(rambly thread) https://twitter.com/MikeKMorrison/status/1196797278897483776

basically: the school system is bad

yes dismantling it too fast would be disastrous to most families bc the "mandatory free daytime babysitting" is baked into our cultural assumptions

but the dilemma of special needs students is a great illustration of the extreme case here

here I will be taking for granted that most families must send their children to a school of some sort and that most families don't have the luxury of alternative arrangements bc of cost, schedule, etc

so:

if you have a disabled child

and you Must cram them into the three-sizes-oughta-be-enough-for-everybody school system

there are No Good Options for meeting their needs

isolated classrooms?

cool now a teacher and two aides have to corral twelve sensitive children, each with their own specific needs, triggers, sensitivities, etc

the routine that soothes one child may trigger an outburst in another

(this is true for kids who aren't obviously special needs too except those kids have largely been drilled to suppress disruptive impulses)

the isolated classroom style generates a feedback loop of intractable behaviors among the kids

for many reasons

one of which is: all it takes is for one kid to be putting the teachers in crisis mode a sizeable chunk of the time for the other students to learn...

...that the only way to reliably get adult attention is to make a bigger crisis

there are many other mechanisms at play here ofc, too many to list before I have to get ready for work

so, moving on:

have you ever had to restrain a child larger than a toddler while they're raging or destroying things? without hurting them, letting them run into traffic, letting them hurt other people?

I have

I am on the large side for a woman (5'9", moderately strong, used to be quite overweight)

(most teachers in the US are women)

trying to restrain a *40lb kid* while she thrashes for an hour to keep her from attacking a pet, a smaller child, etc is physically exhausting

and you can't do anything else while it's going on

you've got like two aides who must manage a group of now-distressed students, some of whom are also inclined to rage or break things or throw hours-long tantrums when distressed (can't blame em)

some kids might have a personal aide but that person is probably a $12/hr college student

and you, the kids, the admins, the district, are subject to the following constraints

1. you must offer free schooling to all children

2. you cannot suspend them easily because of their individual education plans

3. you must follow their individual education plans

4. you cannot hurt them

5. you cannot allow the other children around them to be hurt

6. you have the right to a safe working environment of your own (and even 2nd graders can do damage to an adult)

7. expulsion is near-impossible in most districts because of the aforementioned "right" for every child to go to school

8. their parents cannot homeschool them

9. private schools for children with similar issues are cost-prohibitive, both for the individual families, and for the local gov. to provide at sufficient scale

10. their parents and caregivers are largely not available to pick up their child when the child is in crisis

11. crises are inevitable because of the feedback loop mentioned above

12. somehow you must manage all of this and cram some learning in there too

(oh and every kid is at a different educational level so you gotta track that too!)

so you get quiet rooms

or safe rooms, whichever euphemism you like

are quiet rooms horrible? yep
is it unethical to confine children to locked rooms on a regular basis? yep

wanna call the cops instead?

you can mainstream them, sure

except...

where before you had an impossible situation but could exert some control over the routines, shittily tailoring them to an average of your students' needs

you replace the feedback loop for part of the day with a larger environment...

...that you have no such control over

and apparently twitter is limiting thread size now what the ever loving fuck

TBC maybe; the conclusion is that in the current system and culture that takes that system for granted, there are

no

good

options