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.