Vicious Teacher Leads Bullying of Disabled Child







3 Replies to “Vicious Teacher Leads Bullying of Disabled Child”

  1. I’m assum­ing it actu­al­ly hap­pened this way, and we’re see­ing a fair report (which is a big IF) and I’m out­raged but past outrages–like the assis­tant prin­ci­pal who was track­ing the gay & straight cou­ples for PDA or the teacher who inspect­ed girls at a prom to make sure they had bras on–have an ini­tial wave of indig­na­tion, and after sev­er­al months the teacher still has a job, pro­tect­ed by tenure, the union, etc. 

    If it were my kid (and it could have been, as my kid with AS used to be a 5 year old kinder­garten­er) I’d be plot­ting to make her next acci­dent actu­al­ly LOOK like an acci­dent but you watch, they’re going to slap her wrist and in a few months she’ll be back in the classroom.

    Good for the two kids who vot­ed for let­ting him stay. That’s unbe­liev­able brav­ery from a small child.

  2. What an awful, awful story. 

    I won­der what the truth of the mat­ter is. Pri­ma facie, that does­n’t sound like the behav­ior of any kind of teacher involved in an IEP process that I’ve ever heard of. It leads to so many ques­tions: was the teacher giv­en any train­ing about Asperg­er’s Syn­drome? Did she even believe it exists? Did she think the kid was being pur­pose­ly intractable? With the rise in the inci­dence of Asperg­er’s Syn­drome, that sounds impos­si­ble (we’re talk­ing one out of every 150 kids. In that line of work, you run into them all the time, in bad­ly-coor­di­nat­ed droves.)

    So was it a par­tial sto­ry told, incred­i­bly bad judg­ment, or what? Was it one of those “cry for help” things when a teacher is giv­en an impos­si­ble task? Or is there more to the sto­ry that we’re not hearing? 

    The sto­ry seems to echo pop­u­lar cul­ture’s “real­i­ty tv” notions of vot­ing peo­ple out of var­i­ous jobs, islands, etc. Is this hap­pen­ing in oth­er schools and oth­er con­texts? Life so often imi­tates art, which does tend to place some respon­si­bil­i­ty on art for its representations. 

    It’s trou­bling — that it hap­pened, that it is report­ed this way. I won­der if we’ll ever find out what more hap­pened, what more there is to the story…

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