When students are allowed to fail

Much thanks is given to April at It’s All About Balance for conceiving and hosting this BlogBurst. Please visit here to read other participants’ posts.

 

Once a year, the School District where my children attend school sends out a parent survey. It is a two page, multiple-choice (strongly agree to strongly disagree) questionnaire seeking to find out what students’ parents think about their home schools.

Questions covered include whether the school provides a safe, encouraging environment; whether the teachers are providing adequate feedback to the parents; whether parents feel their child is getting a effective education… and so on.

For the first four years our oldest attended school without her younger brother, the survey was easy to fill out ~ top marks across the board. JM was an exceptional student ~ brilliant, respectful, motivated ~ the student every teacher hopes to have. She flourished and loved every minute of her education. Her teachers were great. They were attentive, supportive, and encouraging. We couldn’t have asked for a better situation.

Then her brother started school.

The survey results were complete opposites. These same schools, the same teachers, went from excellent to appalling. (I have written about WK’s struggles before here, here and here.) I continue to be dumbfounded by how totally different these two students were treated by the same school system, by the same teachers and administrators. The only difference being one was a gifted student… the other one gifted, but with learning disabilities.

I am not one of those parents who refuses to admit that her child is a difficult student. He is. He has a lot working against him, and a lot of it he brings on himself. He can be disruptive and argumentative. He can be frustrating in that he doesn’t always come to class with paper and pencils, or finished homework. He is easily distracted and often smuggles toys to school with him ~ we would later discover that these trinkets were comfort items and having them was one way WK dealt with his anxiety. We admit all this and more.

WK is not a kid who deliberately tries to disrupt a class. He doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. He wants to do well in school and is genuinely depressed when his classes don’t go well. If given the right opportunities he can be, and has been, an A student.

WK has been diagnosed with ADHD, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder with panic/ anxiety tendencies. It would be an obscene understatement to say that these ‘issues’ have had a detrimental affect on WK’s ability to function normally in school.

If he were physically disabled, or designated a ’special needs’ student, the administration and teachers would be falling over themselves trying to help. But, as it stands now, simply asking for what the School District itself requires from the teachers, is being met with resistance and in some cases hostility.

This school year started out promising, but soon turn into yet another futile attempt to get teachers to recognize that WK couldn’t just ‘become’ a good student. Try telling a kid to ‘just do’ his homework when his anxiety level is so high he can bearly move. Try telling a kid to work ahead when he is able to, but is so fixated on routine that to do so would throw him into yet another panic attack. His teachers seem to believe that WK can turn these episodes off and on like a light, and that if he simply wanted to, he could do the work.

All we are asking is for each teacher to provide us with a weekly list of his assignments and that his grades be posted in a timely manner so that we can help him stay on track. You would think we were asking for the impossible, for concessions that are not given to any other student. The School District provides teachers with tools to do just this for all their students, yet the majority don’t. To say it’s frustrating doesn’t even come close.

We have been told on a number of occasion that it is not uncommon for gifted students to fail. This makes absolutely no sense to me. Why wouldn’t teachers want to do whatever they could to help a student, any student, but particularly a bright student, succeed? To just abandon them because they may demand a little extra attention is ludicrous.

Just so you know, we have had IEP (Individualized Education Plan) meetings with teachers, set up plans for teachers and WK to work together to help him stay on task, be prepared for class and participate in a meaningful way. These plans would be implemented and followed for a few weeks and then again abandoned… took too much time away from their other classes ~ I don’t think so.

When did it become standard policy to only teach to the easy students? WK still has a long road ahead of him, but his teachers shouldn’t be the ones throwing obstacles in his way.

Two of his biggest obstacles:

WK’s first grade teacher actually struck him, not once but twice. If I regret anything in my life, it is not pushing to have her fired. At the time we were concerned more for WK than the teacher. She was much loved and respected in the school and community. Whenever we had complained about a teacher prior to this, school life for WK had gone from bad to worse. We feared that had we pursued it to the point of termination, WK would have been forced to move to another school. At the time, based on recommendations from his doctors and counselors, changing schools wasn’t a viable option.

If I had known then, what I know now… I would have homeschooled him, removing him completely from public schools, and had the bitch fired the day we found out.

One middle school teacher had a hate on for him from day one. (Sadly, she was also one of JM’s favorite teachers ~ but, then she was a very low maintenance student.)

Despite what they would tell us about never discussing students, teachers do talk among themselves and do have predetermined biases against students labeled ‘problem children.’

She would yell at him so loudly that students in other classrooms could hear her and ask WK later why Ms S. was so mad at him. If she felt he needed to be disciplined, she would call him to the front of the room and make him call me or his dad while the entire class listened in.

She would call him names and berated him every chance she could.

She tried to have him arrested for stealing when she found him in possession of a ratty tennis ball he had found on the ball field. Going to the extreme of calling in the resource officer, had the football coach not vouched for WK, he would have been handcuffed, processed and arrested for theft of school property.

Her class had gotten so bad, that at one point, the assistant principal had agreed to put a camera in the room. We were never shown that tape. No disciplinary action was ever taken by the administration against her, and there was no alternative class WK could be moved to.

Topping off a truly heinous 8th grade year, she was instrumental in having him banned from his class graduation.

To this day she still refers to him in her classes ~ BY NAME ~ as the ‘worst student’ she ever had during her entire time teaching. (Action against her is still pending)

No child is so reprehensible that a teacher should subject him or her to daily emotional and verbal abuse. Making it worse is a school adminstration that refuses to step in and moderate simply because you are supposedly the only family that has complained about a particular teacher. If one family files six complaints or six families each file a single complaint, these should still be investigated and not dismissed without any consideration.