Constructing Kasun, Educator

It’s Sunday morning, and I received a response from a coworker in my district about a student who I am trying to refer for special education services.  I have a professional relationship with this individual and I respect her work, and I’m stuck here wondering about my response to her email on a non-work day, one where I have a small luxury of time to contemplate.

Here’s the backstory.  My student, “Claudia,” (not her real name) is an incredibly well-behaved, kind student at one of my sites of alternative education.  After a few sessions with her (like all my students, I see her once a week), I realized that her reading comprehension abilities are low, especially relative to beautiful fluency when she reads.  When I try to scaffold understanding in a story to a past event in the story, it feels like shooting at fish in a pond.  Rarely do I hit the target with techniques that work with other students (who are also developing as readers).  Furthermore, when I try to get her to empathize with characters, I can’t find any wide range of emotions from prior experiences in this student’s life.  I look in all directions and find find few cognitive pegs on which to hang understanding with her. 

Her teachers who work with her every day echo similar concerns, so I decided I would take the next step with a student who doesn’t learn the “NORMAL” way, and that is a referral for consideration for special education.

I’ve referred several students in the past and am familiar with the Byzantine and seemingly smoke-and-mirrors process of helping get a student additional support (often hinging upon dominant personalities involved in local screening committees and their subjective backgrounds, biases, and experiences).

So, here’s a thumbnail sketch of the process of referring an ESOL student for special education:

Submit the 8 to 20 pages of forms necessary and supporting evidence to my district’s Dual Language Assessment (DLA) team.  Wait for a couple months (sometimes six or seven if the summer is involved… and then maybe watch the kid get lost if she transfers schools or moves from middle to high school).  The DLA is completed, and if they suggest that there may be something amiss with the way the student learns, the Local Screening Committee (LSC) meets.    Submit a new round of paperwork all over again to the LSC before they meet, and sometimes learn after the meeting that the committee met and they failed to invite you.  If the LSC can be convinced that this student has learning issues beyond the regular difficulties of learning another language (and this is often a heated debate where polarized sides get angry and frustrated and don’t really hear each other out), then the second battery of testing is ordered.  Next, a couple months may pass between the testing and the next meeting of the LSC.  The LSC then decides whether or not the testing indicates that a student should receive special education services.  And then ANOTHER meeting is set later on to write the student’s Individualized Education Plan (IEP) describing which additional services a student may receive and what goals are to be set for the student’s achievement.  The amount of time involved for the original referring ESOL teacher is now up to about 20 hours of work in between checking in on the special education office to make sure they’re following up on the child and scheduling meetings and making sure they remember to invite the ESOL teacher to meetings.  The fastest I’ve ever seen this process work is about six months.  I’ve seen it drawn out over two academic years. 

Back to my email from this morning.  It had taken me a couple months to submit the original referral for “Claudia,” because I didn’t know exactly what to write.  The form itself is intimidating and cold.  Have a look at my district’s forms (not unlike most school districts’ forms)http://www.fcps.edu/ss/linkedfiles/se5.pdf http://www.fcps.edu/ss/linkedfiles/se5a.pdf

Students suddenly become broken down into symptoms and problems, and the teacher takes a cold clinician’s eye toward the “interventions and duration of interventions” and records them.  So this warm child who is a responsible worker in the afternoons with her mom at a salon, who smiles everytime she sees you, who worries about her friend who has an abusive boyfriend, is suddenly reduced to “problems and interventions.”  I don’t deny the need to be methodic in considering how we work with students, but this clinical approach is deadening and reductionist.  There’s so much I want to say about “Claudia,” and yet the form kills the life in both my student and in me as I approach the boxes, acronyms, and bold letters on the forms.

My colleague’s email was suddenly a real, living conversation about this child… and it was only about attempting to get a home phone number for the girl’s mother (the one listed no longer works).  But I found myself wanting to spill my thoughts and worries, our tiny victories as teacher and student, with this woman who had tested “Claudia” this week.  I felt relieved that the tester demonstrated in her email that Claudia was a living child, not a clinical piece of evidence. 

I breathe deeply and hope we achieve seeing the students’ humanity in our jobs as educators, beyond the layers of legal paperwork and bureacracy.  And hopefully we breathe life back into our work and into the children in education.