This isn’t a knock on teachers
Our education system is a massive mess.
Teachers have too many students in their classroom and not enough training and resources to properly support them. Effectively supporting all students is well and truly a team job that is left mostly to the teacher with little help.
Whether teachers are given some level of support depends on their administration, school board, and political will.
It shouldn’t be like this. At all.
Whether or not our children’s needs are met shouldn’t depend on “luck of the draw” and whether we find our child placed with a teacher who gets it, or a teacher who absolutely does not.
It shouldn’t depend on whether we happen to live in a catchment area whose schools have strong leadership who truly understands inclusion, trauma-informed education, and supporting neurodivergent students.
The quality of our children’s school experience sure as hell shouldn’t depend on whether the current provincial government sees inclusive education as a politically important issue.
Unfortunately this is our reality.
Inclusion is part of the job
That said, creating an inclusive classroom and providing students with necessary accommodations is not “extra work”, it’s part of the job.
Again and again I come up against the brick wall of bureaucracy (often banging my head against it in the process). All along the chain of command, from the teacher all the way up to the superintendent, I’m met with resistance.
I’m told the team is working very hard and doing the best they can with limited resources.
I’m sure this is absolutely true.
However, if children are clearly showing us — through their words and behaviour — that their needs are not being met, then it’s not good enough. We can’t just sit back and allow the child to suffer because we’re “doing our best”.
If our best isn’t good enough, we need to figure out what is needed to do better and fucking do it. Seek out training, bring in outside resources. Fuck bureaucracy when you’ve got children in your school who are suffering.
I don’t know how or why we got to a point where we simply accepted that psychological trauma was a “normal” and acceptable part of the school experience.
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