Teaching students with disabilities
I was very interested in the article on Feb. 10 about students with disabilities who are restrained and secluded in Wisconsin’s public schools (“Groups want law strengthened”).
I am a retired middle school teacher who taught seventh grade. Because I taught science and social studies, I had a number of students who fit into this category. The article stated that in 2013-’14, nearly 3,600 students in 381 districts, 80% of whom had disabilities, were restrained or isolated for disruptive or “challenging” behaviors in public schools across the state.
Let me give you a few instances I ran across in my teaching of some of these students. I had students with epilepsy. My classes were very supportive of the students and realized their situation.
Once, one of my students was in the bathroom pounding his head on the tile floor. A colleague and myself had to be gone from our classrooms for over 10 minutes in order to administer aid and calm the boy down during his seizure. Our two classes had no teacher in the room, and we were lucky, because the students understood what we were doing.
Another time, I had science students working in 10 different stations around the room when one of the students had a seizure. They had propane torches which each group could use carefully with an experiment. I immediately had to tell the students to turn off the propane torches and move to their seats while I attended to the stricken student.
Another time, I had a girl who had little or no control of her bladder. She would occasionally have an accident in the room. She was very embarrassed, and I would clean it up. Students wondered how I could do this, and I replied that I had three children.
In almost all the situations, I felt that the class was very empathetic with the students with disabilities but the students wondered why I was supposed to take so much time in dealing with the situations. They made a very valid point: Their educations were being diminished.
The students with disabilities deserve to learn as their classmates do. Yet, to present seclusion, there needs to be personnel immediately available to deal with students when unfortunate situations occur. This is costly in education. Our public schools are being strapped like never before for funding. The classroom teachers cannot be expected to deal with the situations that are bound to occur without compromising the education of the rest of the class.
Henry Althoen Glendale