New School Year Angst

[Veronica]

Special Day Class and there are various types of those. We have SDC classes for severely mentally handicapped, autism, emotionally handicapped... and I think that's it at our school. There's a move to put the less severely handicapped students onto the General Ed teacher's roster. Then they get pulled out into a Learning Center to meet the needs specified in their Individual Education Plan (IEP). Putting those students into a combo class can make for a scheduling nightmare since the combo teacher is already trying to manage two grade level's worth of curriculum.

The resource students also get pulled, but it's generally only about 40 minutes each day, unlike SDC when it can be a couple of hours. I also have a student who will be pulled for Speech, but that's only once a week for 40 minutes. Then for the two English Language Learners I'm suppose to devote 35 minutes a day to a dedicated ELL curriculum. Don't ask what the 28 other kids are doing then.

Each one of these groups is managed by a different district person and they only care that you do what's needed for their subset of your class. It's like they are completely unaware that there are are these other subset in your classroom and no one really advocates for the General Ed population. So the resource teacher who insisted that three of her kids would "greatly benefit from my structure" doesn't care what impact those three kids will have on the rest of the classroom. While I'm wondering are those three kids going to be a disruption when I HAVE to be teaching the other grade level's math curriculum and can't be available to them?

Veronica