Response: The Special Education Overhaul and NYC’s Special District

In a thorough piece on the special education reform that has begun in recent years in New York City Public Schools, ChalkbeatNewYork’s Patrick Wall focuses on several students, families and schools and how they have adapted as a result of new policies that steered students with disabilities to their neighborhood schools in Kindergarten, 6^th and 9^th grades, rather than schools with specific special education programs. 

What the article fails to mention is that these schools, with special education programs and related services already in place, are not just another community school option but are most likely part of New York City’s District 75. This district is an entirely separate district composed only of children with disabilities, most of whom are bused long distances to attend these programs. When people are discussing self-contained options for students with disabilities in New York City, it is important to understand that these are isolated self-contained classrooms in self-contained special education schools and that we are not just talking about another classroom down the hall. 

There are approximately 23,000 students with various disabilities in District 75 with schools throughout the five boroughs. Interestingly, the DOE’s new website no longer lists a specific number of students, only that there are “56 school organizations,” but you can find the number on their old website here. No other school district is organized in such a segregated fashion, as far as I can tell from much conversation and research. Across the country inclusion, in various forms, is the norm and it is rare to find more than a couple of self-contained classrooms in a district or even entire counties. Yet here in New York City, we not only have 23,000 students in self-contained classrooms, but in substantially separate schools. Although many District 75 schools are physically housed in buildings with other schools, anyone in NYC knows co-located schools spend more time fighting for precious space and resources than integrating.

A big part of the problem in New York City is that there is this funnel that flows right to District 75 for any child that a school deems too difficult to educate, like Joseph in today’s Chalkbeat article. It does not specify whether the other, more appropriate school that the administration found for Joseph was not a community school, but I would bet that it was a District 75 school. District 75 seems to be the missing piece of the special education reform story that no one mentions.

As a teacher of students with multiple disabilities, I understand the benefits of a highly specialized environment for some students with significant disabilities, especially in a complex urban school system where these students might otherwise be in the corner of a basement somewhere. The problem is that in NYC we fool ourselves into thinking that these students have been brought out of the basement by having these District 75 school organizations, when in essence they only perpetuate the isolation of students with disabilities from their communities.

A red flag of a student who doesn’t belong in District 75 for me is when a student, like Joseph, is reading at a 3^rd grade level, which means most likely he is not severely intellectually disabled. If he comprehends what he reads, he can most likely access middle school material presented visually or orally with some accommodations. Joseph also managed to get all the way through elementary school and only began to struggle in middle school. This is not the profile of a student with severe/ profound disabilities that District 75 was intended to serve.

Most students in District 75, because of their significant disabilities, are alternately assessed and do not take coursework that leads to a high school diploma. By high school, most schools focus on transition skills that will enable students to communicate in the community, have some independent living skills and possibly have some type of employment. When a student is sent to District 75 from a community school, their IEPs are changed to alternate assessment, which will forever limit their life options because they will obtain an IEP certificate, not a diploma.

Students with severe/ profound disabilities make up less than 1% of all students in NYC, most teachers and schools have never encountered such a student. A student with profound disabilities is non-verbal, meaning he does not use a single word and it is unclear what the child wants because they have not learned a formal communication system, who lacks all control of his muscles and is dependent on others for all their care needs, and who might also be visually impaired, deaf or both. Another student who may need the specialized environment of District 75 might have severe autism, meaning they engage in self-stimulating behaviors all day or be self-abusive and require strict behavioral programs to learn to not hurt themselves or meet their own care needs and gain independence.

No honest discussion about special education reform can take place without discussing the way that New York City isolates its most disabled students in District 75, taking the burden off of community schools who are fixated on test scores and data. I commend those who are trying to stop District 75 from becoming an easy dumping ground for challenging students and can only hope that this is the beginning of an essential change in our city. Until we think of all New York City students as “our kids,” not ours and theirs, no true special education reform will occur.

Take the “I” out of Special Education

It must be my old age. But many years into teaching, the things that stressed me most my first few years just seem so miniscule now. It pains me to watch younger teachers learning the lesson that not everything is in your control and you need to accept the things you cannot change right at that moment. Even in special education, it’s rarely the kids that send a teacher home crying, it’s unsupportive co-workers. Now that I can navigate the always shifting personalities of a school better, I still don’t understand why elders in our profession make it so difficult for new teachers.

A change is coming, I can see it, a special ed “oasis,” where me-focused individuals hid is crumbling.

But I fear they are sucking the life out of everyone around them before they go.

If you’re truly here for the kids, don’t you want to see this teacher succeed, along with all her students?

If you’re here for the kids,

why do you let old school policies and outdated thinking dictate how your school is run?

If you’re here for the kids,

why do you keep telling me how busy YOU are?

And it trickles down to all staff members who are suppose to be collaborating in classrooms.

If you’re here for the kids,

why are you talking about YOUR report?

If you’re here for the kids,

why ignore a teacher who asks you about how you’re working with a student?

If you’re here for the kids,

why are you talking about YOUR feelings and your supervisor?

If you’re here for the kids,

why are you talking about YOUR schedule?

During my undergraduate student teaching in general education, I had a funny moment where I was caught off guard by my clinical supervisor’s criticism. My supervising teacher continually gave me nothing but praise. After keeping a running record of my comments during an observation, the clinical supervisor pointed out that I used a lot of “I” statements. Like, “I need your homework handed in” or “I need you to do this task for me and then come back to me.” I had never realized this. It was something I was naturally doing. It sparked an interesting discussion about how you want students to do things, but not because they’re just doing it FOR the teacher. They should be doing things for themselves, not for YOU.

I think those who are working in special education need to take a close look at how many “I” statements they are using these days and really ask ourselves if we are truly “here for the kids.”

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

Alternate Assessment: Academic Learning for ALL

Let me start by saying that I am a big believer in Alternate Assessment. I think it’s important when the government passes laws like the No Child Left Behind Act that ALL truly means ALL. Now what I think of by all is probably different from what most think of as all. Most people do not know that students like mine exist; they are 1% of 1% of the population. These are students whose learning does not look like other 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th graders.

What pains me, particularly in New York State, is how we completely miss the point of alternate assessment when we start drafting guidelines that only include that students will “identify,” or “select,” to demonstrate their knowledge. My students cannot do that. But that does not mean we deny them access to academic knowledge.

In my first year as a lead teacher, I had the pleasure of working with six high school students with a range of multiple disabilities and complex healthcare needs. The warnings came from the beginning of the year, “watch out you’re going to have to do High School MCAS,” because of how demanding the paperwork would be. I never expected how much it would improve how I collect data and look at adapting materials for my students.

MCAS-Alt is Massachusetts’ alternate assessment. Each state is required by the No Child Left Behind Act (2001) to administer some form of alternate assessment to students with special needs who cannot participate in traditional exams. The goal is to demonstrate that all students have access to the general education curriculum. Students should have age appropriate access, which means they should be accessing material that is based on their chronological grade level. For example, you might thinking a 14 year old with multiple disabilities would love reading Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar (for the 14^th year of their life) because its simple and has bright colors, but really they are just as interested in the pictures and vocabulary in a non-fiction book on the Wright Brothers designing the first airplane.

After reviewing Massachusetts’ Science Standards, I decided that an interdisciplinary unit on "Inventions" would encompass a wide-range of motivating, multi-sensory learning experiences while collecting data for MCAS-Alt. What’s different than New York state is that I was collecting data on my students behaviors that enabled them to interact with grade-level content, rather than completing State-designed tasks. For one student, it was whether he was independently activating a switch to turn on a battery we constructed out of lemons. Another student was working on controlling her arm movements so that she could collect the materials we needed to construct the battery or other simple circuits that we built with the Life Skills’ teacher. We took field trips to a small local airport lead by a student’s father and the Boston Science Museum, where we a got a lesson in static electricity and the biggest smile I have ever seen from a student who is cortically blind and has very limited control over any body movements. Measuring their engagement and emerging communication skills easily aligned with their IEP goals. At the end of the unit, I constructed portfolios full of pictures and data charts that had meaning.

Students with complex healthcare needs just do not have time to waste on meaningless assessment tasks; two of my students passed away in less than a year after I taught this unit. I am at peace knowing that I gave them the fullest academic experience and at their funerals their parents specifically mentioned these scientific adventures. This is the power of alternate assessment when done right.

I’m sharing with you my experience with alternate assessment, because it was my hope that with the Common Core State Standards 50 states would take the opportunity to come together, rather than running in different directions and wasting energy doing the same alignments 50 times over. I will continue to share with you as I do more research into where alternate assessment has been and where it is going, including who should be participating. To start, here are New York State’s current guidelines. Two consortia have formed to design a common alternate assessment aligned to the Common Core, but New York State seems determined to continue to go it on its own judging from its current website on alternate assessment. Disappointingly, the draft now posted on the State Department of Ed website looks exactly like the Alternate Assessment (NYSAA) from previous years.

I’ll be back with more on this soon. Please comment below and share your own experiences with Alt Assessment.

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

What would YOU do with $500 for classroom supplies?

For hosting a student teacher this semester, I recently received $500 to spend as I wish on classroom supplies. It's such a small, but extremely motivating way to encourage mentor teachers to participate in a college's teacher prep program that I would love to see done more often. As I have my Masters + 30 Credits, receiving a tuition voucher, as I have in the past, has not been useful. I host student teachers because I think they will shape the future of education and my students benefit from having another set of knowledgeable hands in the classroom. Money for classroom supplies could help reluctant teachers, who are already stressed with their regular teaching duties, become more interested in hosting student teachers.

Spending this money has made me giddy, as I've never had a set amount that I could spend as I like. At my school, we usually get the bare minimum, and then sometimes even less. Here's what I bought:

- 48, yes 48, Colorful and Exciting, Easy Reader Books, from the Step up to Reading, Ready to Read, and I Can Read series, to supplement the small collection I have and the somewhat boring materials I print from the Internet for my emergent readers. At Booksource.com, you must spend at least $100, but get a 25% discount and free shipping.

- 6 Talking Brix Communicators from Boundless Assistive Technology (Best price and free shipping!), which I have admired from a far since an Ablenet workshop I attended last year. I'm excited to use these small, connectable communication devices during phonics lessons and to make additional 2-cell "Yes/ No" switches. (Right now I only have one iTalk2, but 3 students who use it)

- Apple Camera Connection Kit to connect a USB Switch device to our classroom iPad (yes, I don't get regular supplies, but our school bought iPads...). I also learned this at an Ablenet workshop, see this site for the directions and feel free to email or comment with questions about it. This is one of the most exciting things I've seen with the iPad for kids with multiple disabilities and emerging communication skills.

- Apple VGA - iPhone/ iPad Adapter to connect to my classroom's Smartboard (yes, again, I have a Smartboard, but no regular supplies...), this will allow me to stream video, music, and important speeches, like Dr. MLK's "I have a Dream" from YouTube that's currently blocked at my school.
(As far as I know, it's not against DOE policy, since some schools don't have it blocked, its just that our building happens to prevent kids from searching it on their own)

- Basic Supplies - Markers and Notebooks
At Staples, I was able to buy boxes of 10 Crayola Makers for $2 a piece and this literally made my day. I've given up on the whole "washable" thing since they were $3 more a box!  For some reason this year's group of students love making full page rainbows when coloring, which eats up markers faster than you can believe. I've successfully taught them to put the caps back on their markers and have intimidated my paras to check the marker bin before putting it away, but I'd feel evil telling the kids they can't make rainbows anymore, so yay for $2 boxes of markers!

Also for $2 each, I snagged a bunch of composition notebooks, so we can finally do so more consistent journaling, hopefully with the help of my student teacher since my students will need lots of assistance to "write." (Using key words, simple pictures, stamps or picture symbols)

Its amazing how feeling prepared, rather than always just making do, has breathed new energy into my teaching this week. I'm grateful to a creative teacher prep program for thinking outside of the traditional mold on how to support mentor teachers!


After Thought:
Just in case you're wondering why I haven't used a charity like Donorschoose.org in the past for supplies, I have always had mixed feelings about it because I think its gives public schools the excuse to not properly supply classrooms and puts teachers in a position of begging family and friends for support. My feelings on this come from my first day as a NYC public school teacher, before even seeing my classroom or meeting my students and being told to sit in a room and write a Donors Choose proposal. Our school's tenure checklist even includes whether you showed that you support your school by setting up a Donors Choose page.

I will say though that this fall after several family members asked if they could donate to my classroom, I did set up a successful Donors Choose page and my classroom is grateful for the beautiful puzzles and sensory toys that we received. Their newer funding model doubled what I could get friends and families to donate. If my school wants to take credit for how great my class looks, I guess I can live with it if my students are benefiting.

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: 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.