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

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?

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.