Reflecting to Begin Again: Life of a Teacher

It is not until the new school comes creeping up that I feel I am really ready to reflect on the previous year. It takes a few nights of good sleep and no stress to put everything in perspective. When you’re teaching, everything is in the moment. Danielson may be looking at my lesson plan, but any real teacher knows, it’s all about how you handle everything in your classroom besides the lesson plan. Switching gears to reflecting is always tricky, but so important.

I remember in college, during my teacher prep program, how many times they stressed keeping a teaching journal. Several years in, I still cannot figure out how a teacher finds the time to do that. If I wasn’t actively seeking ways to improve my practice or planning, or researching social services for families, I was trying to get to a yoga class or meet up with friends to keep the work-life balance. I’m always jotting notes on my phone or sticking a post-it with one sentence in a folder, but a whole journal entry? Weekly?! Monthly?! Yikes.

What I have held myself to is writing an end of the year reflection. I finally sit back, take a breath and admire the work my students and team have done over the past 11 and half months. Reflection clears my mind, helps me set my goals for next year and gives me that itch to get back in the classroom and do it all over again, but 10 times better of course.

Since most of my students are non-verbal or have very limited communication, I feel I owe it to them to document all their work for prosperity. When you have the experience of being someone’s last teacher, going back and adding the moments together helps to explain why some kids get a shorter time in this world then others. That’s why its truly special education.

Challenges of Misclassification and Class Size

What makes teaching exciting is that every year you meet a new set of students, even if in a self-contained classroom you keep some students, the combination is never the same from one year to another. The school year prior to this past one was great with a slightly smaller class I felt like the data and organization queen. I was an experienced teacher hitting my stride. I feel best when I am working my hardest and everything starts to gel. Systems are in place, students are following routines and learning, paraprofessionals and therapists are enthusiastic about what they are seeing and becoming a part of it all.

This past year, I ran straight into 12 students who were all over the map in terms of their needs and learning styles. Data went out the window as I spent the fall struggling with classroom management. In special education, where not all learners are on the same cognitive or communicative level, that meant coming up with 12 individual systems. While teaching lessons and writing IEPs, I also had to spend time with each individual finding out what makes them tick and what would motivate them to buy into our classroom. Bonding is the most important part of classroom management, especially with students with significant disabilities. (Dr. Jan van Dijk’s work is so helpful in making connections.)

A big problem for teachers in New York City though is the number of students who are misclassified. So often, a 12:1:4 ratio classroom for children with the most significant, multiple disabilities becomes a catchall. (And yes, NYC(pg 24) puts 12 students who need the most individualized attention in one classroom.) Children who don’t quite fit anywhere else or who were placed there in kindergarten are never given the opportunity to move to a less restrictive environment. As a teacher, you get caught between trying to meet these more academic learners’ needs by focusing on specific emergent reading skills and leaving my other students who are working on early communication skills in the dust. Yes, you can do both, but with 12 kids its impossible to do it all well. I have training, I have tried to figure it out every minute that I’m not sleeping, and I have failed. I hate that feeling that I have failed even before I started because of the system.

My students with true multiple disabilities and complex medical issues needed my attention and it was being pulled in too many directions. These students who use wheelchairs need frequent repositioning and that is not something that can wait. Pressure sores are really important to avoid and nearly impossible to heal. It’s another thing that takes time with an individual student; especially when not all staff is comfortable working with medically fragile children it falls to me to look out for each child. It’s also my job to be sure that when a child is on a mat that the children who are ambulatory and have behavior issues are not hurting him or her! On top of that, the families that have children who are becoming significantly more medically fragile over the years also need my support.

Unexpected and Uncontrollable Interruptions

On top of a challenging mix of students, this year because of the many interruptions we never hit our grove until May and then we lost it by June. To start, Hurricane Sandy really brought our class to a screeching halt too early in the school year. Some students were out for up to two weeks and many had difficulty with their phones, so we could not find out if the families were okay. With District 75, students come from all over to our schools, so it was not guaranteed that just because our neighborhood was okay, that our students were. When students returned, it was like starting all over again to establish our routines.

           

And then in the middle of January the school year came to another abrupt stop when ATU Local 1181 of bus drivers went on strike. If you’ve followed this blog, you know my story. I actually had time to document it because I had almost no students who could make it to school. That my students lost 5 weeks of instruction due to politics, and that no one really cared because they were the students in special education, is still sickening to me. If you listen to administrators or politicians they refer it to as a couple of weeks, when it was 5 weeks, plus a vacation week before students got back to where they belonged. After an odd half of a February break, an early spring break and other events, we were never really able to get into a consistent flow the rest of the year.

Despite that, I did see growth in my students. Unlike some, I actually enjoy administering my end of year assessments. (We use the Brigance Developmental Inventory and the SANDI.) It’s stressful to sit down individually with each student with an erratic end of year calendar, but seeing a small improvement in one communication area, or fine motor skills, or maybe even math is so exciting. This year though, I felt remiss about where my students would have been if not for natural disasters and politics taking away almost 2 months of their school year. Would Jessie be reading full sentences? Would Dom be writing his last name too? Would Steven be making picture choices? Would Florentina be toilet trained? As teachers, there is so much that is beyond our control.

To Begin Again

But what’s beautiful about being a teacher is that every school year is a fresh start. One of the best parts of teaching is the automatic reset that happens over the summer, even if it’s a few short weeks for us in special education. What other career gives you an opportunity to come back to a new beginning every year? A new beginning to be the best teacher I can be and help my students achieve as much as they can. An opportunity to take the lessons from the previous years and set goals for what I’d like to do better. It’s why I can’t see myself leaving the classroom anytime soon.

            “The world is round and place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.” - Ivy Baker Priest

The End of the Return from Bus Strike Honeymoon

Today officially marked the end of the lovely honeymoon period after the end of the bus strike when my students were so surprised and excited to be back in school that they listened to whatever I asked them to do. Today they would not. It felt like a day in September today, not March.

It started yesterday with the tickling, Juan would not stop touching and tickling anyone who came in his path, which set off all of the boys trying to tickle each other. Various consequences were threaten, it just would not stop, no one earned choice time. Today, Juan refused to go to his reading group and insisted on following the Physical Therapist (PT) around the room. I had to resort to taking his prized Dora the Explorer paddleball from his backpack. He immediately leapt to where he needed to be. Later in the day during Speech, I caught him lifting his shirt and making inappropriate gestures at the speech teacher’s back, which is usually a rare behavior for him. Since he did complete the rest of his work, he narrowly managed to earn choice time today.

Adama who did not come to school at all during the bus strike, has developed this unstoppable attitude. Now when I separate her from the group, after she hits or kicks her classmates, she talks back in order to continue to disrupt the group. She is more violent than she had been, in the past she had just been impulsive and accidently hurting her friends. Positive reinforcement is not working and I am going to have to come up with something new.

But the saddest for me was dealing with Florentina. Florentina is a student that has the most intensive sensory needs that I have ever seen. She uses a wheelchair because she walks unstably on her tippy toes. She is verbal, but speaks in memorized phrases. When she started in my classroom three years ago, every morning she would have a full blown, violent tantrum upon entering the classroom. I still have small scar marks from her pinching and scratching. People who visited my classroom back then are shocked to know that she is the same girl; her behavior has improved so much because of a consistent routine and the bond that we have formed. Then she missed almost 5 weeks of school because of the bus strike and an additional week due to doctors’ appointments and a cold.

Today Florentina lost it. When the Physical Therapist quickly transferred her, forgetting her old ways, to a new classroom chair that we received while she was out, it triggered a tantrum. She dangerously tried to slide herself out of the chair and hit or pinched anyone who came near, while crying and yelling. This is why you did not keep a child with special needs out of school for 5 weeks. It took all my attention from my 11 other students to prevent a full meltdown. I even gave her the marker that she had been fixated on, just because I knew how hard the transition was for her and that I could phase out the behavior another day. The crying continued as I tried to lead my small reading group on the other side of the room. Finally, 20 minutes later she calmed down enough to participate in a small group activity. This incident was not only hard on her, but disrupted everyone else in the classroom.

Math was also quite the challenge with Adama refusing to not touch everyone and everything. Everyone else’s new thing is to rest their heads on the table and feign tiredness. By the time choice time rolled around and I was trying to write notes home to parents, chaos had enveloped us with everyone complaining about everyone else. One or two kids having a bad day can quickly wear on everyone else in the room.

So the honeymoon is over, it’s time to revamp my behavior plans and schedule a few yoga classes afterschool. How long will it take Adama and Florentina to recover from this? Why do my other students and staff have to be distracted by their behaviors? As teachers, we welcome our students, close our doors and settle down to business, it’s just what we do. It just pains me that this loss of instruction was something that was unfairly done to my students and did not need to happen.

*Pseudonyms are used to protect identify of students

And when the bus strike is all over…

22 days, 22 days, 22 school days. It’s like my students had a summer break in the middle of the school year. Except, their summer break is usually 10 days. They’ve never been out of school for 22 days, unless they had major surgery or a serious illness.

So Wednesday, they will roll into school and I will happily greet the chaos that is our normal. But what have we learned at the expense of them missing 22 school days?

I can only hope that we have started a conversation about why special education students have to be bused all across New York City and beyond to have their educational needs met. I hope we have realized that we must do better.

Of course, I was ecstatic Friday afternoon to hear the possibility of the strike ending and in almost disbelief when I heard it was officially over Friday evening. It’s hard to believe that a letter from 5 Democratic mayoral candidates was all it took. I also like to think that schools being less fearful of the press this past week also hastened the end. When the face of the bus strike became the children with special needs who weren’t getting to school, 1,285 never made it at all, ignoring the strike was no longer an option for at least some politicians.

Even in my excitement that I will be reunited with my students this week, after recharging my batteries over this long weekend, Bloomberg and Walcott continue to exasperate me. With the claim of saving $60 million, Bloomberg and Walcott are calling themselves the victors and saying that they “put children first,” after my students lost almost 5 weeks of school. On Friday after the Democratic mayoral candidates came together to craft a letter that ended the bus strike, Bloomberg and Walcott issued their first official statements in weeks, gloating. And before this, Walcott even made a statement saying that students whose educations were disrupted will still be expected to participate in state testing, which we all know will lead to their scores being held against their teachers.

Now I’m getting asked how will my students make up the lost instruction time. To be honest, they won’t. Most of the students with the most significant special needs had the most difficulties getting to school; they already attend school year round. In addition, there is already a shortage of Occupational, Physical, and Speech Therapist; there is no way they will be able to make up missed therapies during the school day. This leaves it on the parents to find therapists who will come into their homes, which is extremely difficult to do for even the most savvy parents.

So its time to make a plan for what needs to be done going forward.

The DOE’s Office of Pupil transportation needs to be held accountable for creating routes that are efficient.

The bus drivers and matrons’ union, ATU 1181, needs to create a platform that legitimizes their concerns, rather than just fighting for job protections. They now have until the next mayor is elected to do this.

NYC Schools, in particular District 75, needs to do a self-examination. Why are students being bused near and far to receive their educations?

Parents need to push the NYC DOE to provide appropriate educations in their communities, ideally their community schools.

I hope to do my part by continuing this blog and developing a strong community of teachers, teacher educators and advocates who recognize the improvements that need to happen to special education in New York City. Let’s not just be satisfied with getting our kids back to school, let’s make this system better so that this never happens again.

I’m looking forward to giving you an update on Wednesday, our first day back!

Stuff You Can't Makeup: “Trained” drivers and matrons?

I can’t take it, I’ve mostly held back for nearly 4 weeks, but the ATU 1181 and its drivers and matrons have finally made me lose my patience with them. I just can no longer have sympathy for a group that holds children with special needs hostage in order to better themselves. If they had gone about asking for job protections strategically or started by helping reform the entire transportation system, I think the union would look much better to all parties involved. You don’t all of a sudden call a strike and want to be taken seriously as a union by only demanding job protections.

So as someone who interacts with drivers and matrons daily, as well as for a weekly community outing, have I got the dirt for you!

Over and over you hear the ATU cite how they are just trying to make sure children have trained drivers and matrons, especially dealing with children with special needs. This gets parents to support them, although parents don’t see what I see. Clearly, I’ve heard, “its for the children,” one too many times.

I have found that over the course of 5 years at the same school, it’s been a rotating cast of characters of bus drivers and matrons. I’m not sure of the argument that bus drivers want to be on the same route from year to year, we’ve never had that and often drivers change 2 to 3 times a year on a route. I can’t even keep track of the matrons.

Repeatedly, I have matrons and even drivers who do not know how to use the tie down systems on their buses to properly secure wheelchairs. They then sometimes take over a half hour to tie down an average of 5 wheelchairs, that’s six minutes per chair. Sometimes they arrive without enough tie downs for the number of students who are going on the trips. On my last outing, a small wheelchair bus that should accommodate at least 3 wheelchairs had tie downs for only one chair. I then had to teach the matron how to slide the tie downs into the tracks and that the chair will tip over if you do not use 4 tie downs on the floor, not on the wall of the bus. (Lucky for them, I used to secure and drive my entire class in a wheelchair van at my old school.)

The DOE’s Office of Pupil Transportation (OPT) will fine these companies only if the school repeatedly follows up. But why as a union do they not fight for better training for their members?

On these community outing days, I've been told I have too many wheelchairs. I've been told that on a bus with room for 8 chairs, they would only take 4. That I need to split the kids up so they didn't have to tire themselves out to tie them down, even though I didn't have a teacher for a second bus. I've seen matrons that are injured and can't do tie-downs for a wheelchair sit on a bus while the driver did all the work.

On our regular routes, I have seen drivers quick to say that a wheelchair's brake does not work to avoid having to pick up a student. They will repeatedly harass the families about the brakes, without even checking them again, even after the physical therapist has fixed them. I am the one who fields the phone calls from families trying to get the bus drivers and matrons to stop complaining to them.

They seem to pick the rules they want to follow that are convenient for them. I've seen a driver who refused to transport a walker device along with a wheelchair, but gets off the loaded school bus every morning in back of the school to smoke a cigarette. I also repeatedly see matrons, who have been off all day, get off a loaded bus of students to use the restroom. I've heard drivers and matrons who have made parents feel extremely bad about their children's special needs that cause them to scream during the bus ride. They’ll tell parents that they need to talk to their child, even though their child is non-verbal and doesn’t understand.

Is this where their special training comes in?

Today, I found out that 2 porters, who would carry a student out of a public housing building with no elevator, have been paid to sit on a bus all year for a student who’s home has an elevator. Why didn’t the driver tell the school and the company when he noticed? (And of course it’s the smoking, rule obeying bus driver’s route!)

I mean listen to this WNYC report, they’re not even outside picketing all day! One even has a doctor’s note! What a joke.

I will say that the entire system between the DOE's OPT (Office of Pupil Transportation) and the bus companies and the actual drivers and matrons is a mess. I wish the Amalgamated Transportation Union 1181 would be shedding light on overcrowded buses, which the parents would support, and professionalizing their unions, rather than all of a sudden making a fight for employment protections. 

So parents, this is what I see and I know you have experienced a lot of this as well. Let’s not let them continue to use your children for their own agenda. It’s time to call them out and end this strike. 

Bus Strike Day 18: The word of the day is: useless.

As in the information that the DOE is providing is useless. 

In response to why my students can’t get to school, I figured it was time, as we approach Week 5 of the NYC Bus Strike, to review what I’ve been hearing from families and why the solutions that the Department of Education (DOE) are providing do not help.

Let’s look at this DOE website for checking the status of a bus route. First, if you don’t have internet in your home or even a computer, you’re not getting to this site. Secondly, if you’re not able to read English, forget about it.

Today, we discovered that a bus that has not been picking up students or showing up at school is listed on the above site as never having been disrupted. OPT (Office of Pupil Transportation) is currently investigating.

The DOE website also continues to link to this useless page, with all the companies saying their overbooked.

All of these resources are just too much for families to navigate. Over and over again, I hear its not necessarily the transportation vehicles, but the time it would take from work to accompany their child back and forth.

Let me share some examples from my class of 12 students who have multiple disabilities with you.

Three students come from the Bronx and one is ambulatory but mom can’t leave her vending stand in Manhattan for the amount of time that would be needed to pick her child up, bring her to childcare in the Bronx and return to Manhattan. It would cause a considerable loss of income. She has arranged for her child to stay with an elderly neighbor and also has other children she needs to get to school. Mom also has limited English and speaks a rare language, so it is difficult to communicate the transportation options that change rapidly.

Two other families in the Bronx have tried calling various accessible options so that their children can be transported safely in their wheelchairs, but have been unsuccessful in securing one. One set of parents has special needs themselves and it is just too much for them to navigate, although they keep assuring me that they will try. The other parents keep calling the companies I give them numbers for with no success and have practically given up. This has been too much for this student’s mother, as he recently had a feeding tube placed and has a variety of other health needs that she is constantly managing.

In Manhattan, closer to school does not necessarily make its easier because it still requires an adult to be available to accompany a child to and from school. One student who uses a wheelchair has other siblings with special needs who go to different schools; does mom have to choose who gets to go to school? Other families have come down with the flu, mom is willing to try a taxi, but she’s sick and can’t manage it.

Another family doesn’t understand what their child is missing out on at school and has arranged for him to stay home with grandma. They said they will wait the strike out and they don’t want the Mayor to permanently take away the service if they make it look too easy. I can’t make them take the information I have and unless their motivated their not going to navigate through it. I think this one makes me the saddest, because I think it happens a lot with families with children with multiple disabilities who don’t understand all the therapy, interaction and skills they are getting at school and how it directly impacts their children’s quality of life.

Also in Manhattan, there is another family with an ambulatory child, but the father works nights and his mother, who is new to this country, does not feel comfortable navigating the city with her child with special needs and no English. Again, I give the information, not sure if its fully comprehended, and tell them to hang in there.

Three families have successfully navigated public transportation, but their attendance is still inconsistent because it is so time-consuming and exhausting. I shared one particular experience here. One father works nights and has 2 other children that need to be taken to their neighborhood schools while his wife provides childcare out of their home. Another student doesn’t understand why her yellow bus isn’t coming and it’s a fight for mom to get her on the subway. Mom asked me in her limited English to give her a pep talk on the subject of how “big girls take the train.”

This brings me to today and why it was a particularly frustrating day. I’m not talking frustrating like a little something annoyed me, I’m talking about a day that makes you question your morals, the way the world works and why I work in a system that doesn’t value the work I do or the children I teach.

Today, after once again being questioned by administration on whether I was distributing the DOE’s information to parents, much of which I’ve collected from websites like Advocate for Children and Resources for Children with Special Needs myself and have passed on to said administrators, I asked, as a teacher, is it my responsibility to be distributing this information? I do it out of the goodness of my heart and because I can’t stand not seeing my students come to school. I communicated with my parents regularly even before the #busstrike. But I fear that my consistent phone calls have prevented others from being held accountable for this information being distributed in multiple languages so that families are truly assisted. 

So what do I do now?

Stuff You Can’t Make Up: Lost Instruction Day 12 of the Bus Strike, 1 out of 12 Students in School

When my one student arrived at school today, his mother shared with us the craziest story of her commute earlier in the week. Even through a translator, I could tell how ridiculous it was by mom’s facial expression and my knowledge of key Spanish words.

Her son, my student, uses a wheelchair, is 13 years old and has a speech impediment, so he tends to gesture and use keyword signs. As they were traveling on the city bus on Monday, another older passenger coughed. My student playfully said, “eww,” and the person who coughed shot out her seat as if to hit him in the face and started cursing his mom out. The bus driver had to intervene.

I didn’t hear this story until today because his mom was so stressed by the incident; she couldn’t laugh about it until 4 days later.

It made me appreciate the effort she makes to get her son to school even more. If I have to look for a positive in this bus strike it is the greater opportunities to connect with families. The ones that we now see everyday and the ones we’re on the phone with trying to get their kids back to school. We miss this consistent connection when our students all come on yellow buses from far away. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had strong enough school options that we could keep all students in their communities and make it easier for families to come to school more often?

Stuff You Can’t Make Up: A Day when 10 out of 12 Students Can't Get to School (Thanks again to the bus strike)

A glimpse into the characters that you meet during a day in a NYC District 75 school and why a good sense of humor is even more important for special educators than our famed “patience.”

• After 4 years in the same classroom, the DOE suddenly decided that putting an outlet inside the bathroom would not be such a bad idea, so that we no longer need a 30 foot extension cord to plug in our changing table. Its a newer building but was oddly built with no outlets in the bathrooms and very few outlets in the classroom.

This led to:

• Discovering a dead mouse and the source of a really bad odor that has lurked around my desk for about 2 weeks, which was causing some awkwardness since the smell arrived at the same time as my new student teacher. In addition, of course the timing of this smell coincided with the 2 weeks that I have sat at my desk for the most consecutive time ever. (Again, thank you bus strike.) Sadly, I had just accepted that the smell was coming from the radiator and that there was nothing I was going to be able to do about it besides invest in Febreeze. Turns out the little guy was stuck behind the one set of bookshelves that I didn’t check behind, whoops.
• An outlet for an adjustable changing table was also installed in the nurse’s office so a student not from my class can be changed there. The nurse spent her entire day complaining that the outlet’s really not necessary, redirecting the electricians and causing confusing because in her opinion the student should not be changed in her office. Excuse me? I couldn’t think of a more appropriate and private place than the nurses office for a health procedure.
• So my new student teacher goes to lunch, I gather my papers and prepare to go get something myself and find my coat missing. How long would it take for her to realize that she’s wearing my coat? (So that I could get my own lunch) Not until she returned to school a half hour later and I said, “So do you like my coat?”
• One of my best paraprofessionals is moved to a 6:1:1 autism classroom with pretty independent kids, bringing the total number of adults to 6 in the room. (Obviously, the stellar teacher was jealous that she didn’t teach “those” wheelchair students and have only 2 students, and so complained to the admins.)
• The ESL teacher usually spends Thursdays with my class, so I coerced him into teaching a science lesson, or a lesson on anything he wanted, just something. Result? He sat at the table texting on his phone while my one student (the other was at physical therapy) was looking at a magazine for a good 5 minutes before I realized it was too quiet and looked up from my data sheets. I asked, “So are you going to actually do an activity today?” He jumped out of his seat like the idea hadn’t occurred to him and grabbed a book off the shelf for a makeshift read aloud.

Its time to think about who this bus strike is really hurting…

Today I had four students, after averaging just one over the past week. As I taught reading and math, I could not help but think of the eight other students who have now missed out on nine days of instruction. Following Hurricane Sandy, there was public outrage over students missing 5 days of instruction, but my students who use wheelchairs can miss 9 days with no end in sight and then its hardly covered in the press. All we see are the workers, but what about my students?

My students don’t do worksheets, they need to be in school to learn and receive therapy. One NY Daily News article described the pain not receiving regular physical therapy causes for students (1/17/13). Routine is essential to my students learning important life skills that give them the ability to communicate and be independent. You may think I am a babysitter, but every skill I teach reduces the cost of my students’ care later on in life, and your future tax burden.

As a teacher, I am the one fielding the sad phone calls from the families in broken English asking what can they do, they live in a different borough, it would take two buses and a train, they work nights. I hear them tell me how their children wake up every morning hoping that this will be the day they can finally go back to school. The children feel like they are being punished and don’t understand why.

The past two days my phone has been ringing off the hook about the new voucher system for car service. The Department of Ed’s Office of Pupil Transportation took the time to call all families with students who use wheelchairs to tell them that the city would pay for their cabs. But they didn’t actually have any cab company numbers for the families and directed the families to call the school. In turn, the school could only offer paperwork for the cabs, if the families could find one on their own who would wait two weeks to be paid. Here is the DOE website that offers a 70-page list which does not specify which would take vouchers. Helpful? Try also not being able to read English.

Now in Albany during budget hearings, when asked how attendance has been affected during the bus strike, Chancellor Walcott replies, “not at all.” Really, not at all? How about we ask the families? ( https://twitter.com/yasmeenkhan ) Would you consider attendance only reaching 73% in District 75 (NYC’s Special Ed district) today just fine? ( Gothamschools.org )

This bus strike is slowly draining me, as if it’s not hard enough to work in NYC schools and quietly observe the inequities. Now the inequities are glaringly obvious. It is the families that are financially secure that can foot the bill to get their children to school, because its not only car fare, but also lost wages to spend an hour each way to bring your child to school and an hour each way to pickup your child up from school, if you only have one child that is.

It is time to have a real conversation about the real problems behind busing special needs students out of their communities for their educations. It is time to get these students back to school.