[Adrienne]

Originally Posted by Darla_G

I discussed this with my wife who works in an elementary school. She indicated that a moderately affected autistic child will be placed into a normal classroom. This process is call mainstreaming. Normally (at least around here) an aide is provided for the autistic child and in more severe cases this may be a full time one on one.

So her feeling is before you entirely dump on the one teacher she said you would have to consider the entire situation as that one student could be so disruptive that nothing else could be done while this one child is acting out. I have heard my son mention similar things about one autistic child that was in a number of his classes previously and that one did have a full time aid! So a lot of the complaint here could be directed back to the School itself or the School District for not adequately addressing the needs of Special Education kids.

The point about doing a vote seemed inappropriate though and part of it is the teacher may have been totally unprepared for dealing with Special Education students. Not all teachers ever receive that training. Her final point is that a child with Autism can learn to function in a normal classroom environment, but not without special assistance and she felt that the way the mother was acting on all the TV interviews is she kept saying that the child was perfectly normal and that may have been far from the case. (she was on Today show i believe)
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Teachers in my opinion have it kind of rough. They have better feel a pretty strong desire to teach because i think it is difficult dealing with all those kids all day and the pay could stand to be way better. Couple that with the fact that whenever there is a problem the parents automatically think it is not their child that is not the problem and it must be something that the teacher did. You may or may not get support from your School Administration in these matters. and now on top of it you have all these stupid mandates (No Child Left Behind) that accomplish nothing and create one more test that everyone must teach to, not to mention the extra paper work it creates.

I always love your input darla g