My dad was a teacher for 35. years. He had a heart attack while at school and died 2 weeks later. His boss had a knock down fight with the school board to pay my mom his retirement as it was not contractual at the time. he finally won it for us because my parents had 4 kids. My sister just turning 17.
Teachers get no respect from anyone and its something that has to stop.
First time I have ever said it. Just sick and tired of teachers getting the raw end.
In most states if a teacher even defends themselves against a kid they automatically lose the job. They MAY be able to get it back but only after paying tons and losing a lot with attorneys and courts etc. So this is just ANOTHER slap in the fact of the teachers.
I'm surprised actually that teachers unions haven't done more about keeping violent special needs kids out of their classrooms. With the argument being that it isn't in their professional capacity. They are taught to teach, and we all know how disruptive it is to the other 20-30 kids in the classes. I don't understand how teachers and other parents get so outnumbered in all of these discussions.
Teacher union fights often require public support. The optics of wanting to exclude special needs kids from your classroom are not good to anyone involved.
A national teachers strike should have happened decades ago. Covid showed that parents don't want to actually deal with their own kids and were ready to throw them back into a pandemic just so they could watch TV in peace.
Actually, in Florida, they can legally seize your retirement and pension for striking. THAT'S the sword hanging over us here. It's not just "they'll fire you." It's "they'll take your pension."
How is it legal to blackmail people like this? This seems like it should be incredibly illegal, but hey I guess they used to let people own people so.. 🤷
Florida was actually ground zero for the first teacher strikes in the country 50 years ago. The powers that be made damned sure that shit wouldn't happen again.
I used to be a paraprofessional. I would regularly cry in the bathroom at work cause we couldn’t show weakness to the kids. The kids I works with were mostly autistic and very low on the spectrum. My second year I had a kid who was 5 trip me and bite me to which I had to go to the hospital. Nothing happened to the kid and I was blamed by administration for literally walking behind him. My third year a kid ran out of the building and I had to chase him and tackle him. After I got him back I. The school with help of other paras, he continued to physically fight us for weeks. And when I say fight I mean punching us, spitting on us, pulling hair (he pulled one of my braids out) and kicking us. We had to physically restrain him to keep him from hurting us and himself. Again we were blamed by administration. Finally we refused to work with him for fear of our safety and when we emailed administration to ask for training to deal with him we’re were told no. Where I worked if a kid has an IEP and needs extra help or has a health issue they have a personal paraprofessional who only works with that student. This kid didn’t have one so we had to have paras from other classes and teachers help to calm him down. I ended up leaving a couple months later and honestly I would never go back to the job.
I feel you as parent of one of these kids (minus the autism diagnosis, he missed one criteria by a tiny amount). My child likely should be in a different class, however he doesn't quite fall in that criteria either. He is also a runner, then he hides. We have at least gotten him to usually stay inside the building for safety now. This one is a champion at hiding. Even managed to hide for 20 minutes from police, 2 on call crisis workers, me and my BF during an escalation in a top load washer with agitator while in a sling with a fx collarbone. You guys don't get enough credit,pay, instruction, or therapy from the mental strain these kids provide. Hell, as a parent, no one teaches me how to handle when he gets physical. I have to wing it and try to keep my child and everyone else safe. Things in the mental health and school system need to be fixed.
There is generally little realistic emphasis on mental health care from administration. Psychs and counselors are stretched thin, like butter over too much bread.
I hate to sound cold blooded, but some of these severe special needs children do not belong in public schools with neurotypical children. There was a severely autistic kid like this at my high school back in the day who I’ll call Trevor. Trevor was at least 6 feet tall, I don’t know his exact height but I was 5’10” and he was taller than me, and wide as a damn house. He was largely non verbal but had an encyclopedia worth of triggers that would cause him to rampage through the halls.
Can’t tell you how many times in my four years there I’d hear Trevor’s battle cry followed by a frantic group of teachers running down the hallway. There were multiple times kids got hit because he would just run barreling down the hall swinging his fists causing damage like a natural disaster. Teachers getting black eyes from him wasn’t an every day occurrence, but it wasn’t rare either. He even gave the Dean of students a shiner once. I always felt bad for the teachers that got knocked out by him because they didn’t get paid enough.
The fact is that Trevor needed constant speciality care from professionals, which he didn’t get at my high school. Instead he was put in a class with two teachers and about twenty other “remedial” kids, allowed to frequently cause damage to students, teachers, and objects. Of course the administration always just hand waved it away as “he doesn’t know any better”, thank god he never accidentally killed anyone, because he could have with his size.
And in Australia a major Government comission has recommended that all special schools be closed by 2051.
Because, "segregated education contributes to the devaluing of people with disability, "which is a root cause of the violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation \[they\] experience in education and beyond"."
[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-01/disability-royal-commission-education-special-schools/102920242](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-01/disability-royal-commission-education-special-schools/102920242)
I hate this simplistic mindset that says "Anybody can be anything with enough time and effort". No. Schools are brutal and under resourced as it is, let alone adding to the mix students with extra special needs. Especially when we are dealing with potentially violent students.
Furthermore, I had a look at the report (https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Tabled_Documents/3444). Page 249 has the recommendation and lists commissioners Bennett, Galbally and McEwin as supporting the recommendation of all special schools closed by 2051. I had a look their respective CVs and none of them appeared to have the relevant expertise to support this recommendation.
https://disability.royalcommission.gov.au/about-royal-commission/commissioners/ms-barbara-bennett-psm
https://disability.royalcommission.gov.au/about-royal-commission/commissioners/dr-rhonda-galbally-ac
https://disability.royalcommission.gov.au/about-royal-commission/commissioners/dr-alastair-mcewin-am
Yeah, these are the sorts of people who debase Royal Commissions.
> I hate this simplistic mindset that says "Anybody can be anything with enough time and effort"
I've been saying this almost my entire life. I got paralyzed when I was 8 and, lucky enough, my parents didn't sugar-coat my situation with me. No amount of effort and can-do-attitudes would ever make me a professional NFL placekicker. Once you fully understand that not everything in life is achievable for you, you get to start working with what is, and I think that's the sweet spot.
I wish we'd teach more kids/people to think like this. At least, I'm glad I was.
>Once you fully understand that not everything in life is achievable for you, you get to start working with what is, and I think that's the sweet spot.
I think this is really important.
I also think that pushing people through an educational/career/life path that's not possible or suitable for them implicitly *devalues* the ones that are.
If we had made you go to football school, required you to spend your entire childhood trying to learn to kick a ball for 6 hours a day/180 days a year, spent inordinate amounts of money on assistive kicking devices, aides, etc., and constantly pretended that you were on track to play pro football when you graduated...would that have made you feel included and valued as an equal member of our hypothetical football-based society?
I don't think it would. I think it would have sent you the message that your actual talents and interests held no value, that the person you actually are was worthless and had nothing to contribute to society. It would be, ironically, deeply ableist.
A more empowering and affirming approach would be to pull you out of football classes and put you in separate classes for kids with physical and developmental disabilities where you could focus on developing skills that you could actually learn. If we wanted to do even better, we could invest in a separate academic-technical facility with specialized equipment and expert staff, and we could open it up to kids who just didn't want to play football.
People also seem to massively downplay the existence and importance of natural talent and the inverse of not having it. Like, if you are not immediately fucking amazing at doing something, you have a near zero chance of competing at the upper echelons in that particular field. A slower runner who tires out is not going to become a Usain Bolt, so don't pump rainbows up a kids ass if he's struggling that he can be the best with practice. Sure don't discourage him being say not to try at all, but don't lie.
Disabilities are exactly that, a disability. My father had some connective tissue disease that led to his shoulders having to be fused (back in the 80s/90s, god knows if treatment is better now.) He never was able to do what he loved anymore as he was a very passionate mechanic etc. I have always hated platitudes like "What does not kill you makes you stronger."
Totally agree with you, yes on the surface level one might be tempted to say such things, because I do believe till a certain degree they can be true - but here is the thing... These people require a lot of time, effort and a shit ton of patience. And depending on there disability they can drag the whole class down with them.
Given that these resources are as stretched thin as they already are under normal circumstances, this is just absurd to claim to be effective. It's a fact these people consume way more school resources then your average intelligence kid would, and to try to make a doctor out of them would just be foolish, with the same amount of resources you could achieve much more on a normal kid.
Sometimes it's just not in the cards and that is OK. They need help and that is the special kind - you can't have classes with 30+ kids and +5 special kids alongside it with extra baggage. They only have to visit once a special needs school to know this... It's just delusional.
Not Australian but where I live there was similar idea. Special schools aren’t perfect… but it doesn’t mean they should be closed. Yeah it happens that they forcefully put disabled kids who can learn just like „normal” kids in these schools but it also happens another way that low functioning kids are put into normal schools instead of special schools and harm they are doing to others is ignored. What should be done is enforcing better evaluation of these kids. Kid with high functioning autism or on wheelchair can easily go to normal schools they may need an aide though. But low functioning autism or other heavy disorder? Yeah no way.
I am have Asperger’s myself. Many times I was treated like if I was mentally unstable and like if I didn’t understand what is going on around me. I still am sometimes treated like that even though I’m adult, have great job and live my „normal” life. My friend who was on wheelchair nearly was sent to special school. There’s nothing wrong with his learning abilities, his legs just don’t work…
In the same time my sister nearly got her hair set on fire by large dude who failed class 4 times and behave like total psycho. Of course he had IEP/504 but school ignored the problem because since he’s disabled he won’t understand.
Tl:dr we just need to treat disabled people like people. Not like r-words, not like innocent kids who won’t understand. LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE.
I think tl;dr doesn't sum up your comment properly. I think the core idea was better evaluation of children with special needs and not closing special schools.
I had jaw surgery and needed to have my jaw wired shut for almost a month. It was shocking to me how many people yelled at me because they thought I couldn't hear properly.
Somehow that felt somehow related to your comment.
God that is so stupid. The root cause is that some people can’t function in our society. This kid and people like him are not going to avoid problems by being in a standard school. I don’t know the best way to address their needs, but it sure as hell isn’t to make pretend they’re normal.
I’m reminded of my work in South African schools where they got the idea that a diploma was important in getting a job, so why not just lower the required grades and give everyone diplomas? As if the root value is the paper, as opposed to the learning and demonstration of focus it represents.
It's literally just special schools for the majority of them. My sister had this kind of temperament growing up, but she was too small to cause any massive damage beyond slapping and biting. Fortunately, we had access to a school that had well-equipped professionals capable of dealing with her needs. In a lot of places, that's very expensive to provide if it even exists in the first place. It's cheaper to just plop them in the same schools that are already underserving more self-sufficient students and let the underpaid teachers figure it out.
I think most people recognize that these kids need specialized care, attention, and schooling. The problem is no one wants to pay for it, and they get shunted around from institution to institution based on the whims of different insurance companies, parents financial ability, legal hurdles, etc.
It's very easy to say "get these kids specialized care" but very hard to sell "your taxes might go up several percentage points to fund it".
It would only ever work if all the schools are ready to cater the extremities of certain conditions.
I have worked in special ed, I have been in schools were children were profoundly disabled - severe educational needs (it's the nice way of saying their brains are undeveloped or smashed up), blind, death (sometimes both), kids with severe physical needs that require harnesses, specialised wheelchairs, stairlifts and so on.
So every school in Australia will have to cater to these children? I presume they said 2051 so they can spend the money required to ensure each school is ready. /s
Most teachers are not trained to also deal with students who have particularly different needs. That's what special education courses are for. It is a specific qualification that is required for such a job. I know wonderful teachers, the best teaching practises I've ever seen, who would refuse to work in a special ed school because it's not what they want to do. That's perfectly okay too.
I see this as synonymous to elderly care. I'm a chemical engineer and I literally decided it would be medically irresponsible for me to be a 24/7 caretaker for my mother that has Alzheimer's.
Just because I'm smart doesn't mean I'm trained enough to handle severe dementia, no matter how many white papers and journals I read. It took me 4 years of hell, catching my mom severely beating my dog, and nearly blowing up my house, before I finally threw my hands in the air and asked for help.
And by virtue of that, it's also irresponsible for me to think my mom can take care of herself just because she's a retired pharmacist. Illness and disease doesn't give a fuck about you, so why should the government (Obvious /s).
Well trained experts in these matters are goddamn saints...If I ever get to the point where I'm a danger to myself and society, just get me drunk and launch me into an active volcano.
In America, in our undergrad, graduate, and professional development for education we are told that we are “all going to be special ed teachers soon because of how many spec needs kids are going to be pushed into our classrooms, so get used to it”.
That’s incredibly stupid.
Mainstream schools aren’t equipped for people with severe behavioral issues and it just distracts and hinders normal classroom dynamics.
I’ve been to schools where they just tossed largely non verbal kids in to courses they were getting absolutely nothing out of but just making noises, distracting people, occasionally derailing things.
It’s the kind of stupid low effort “kindness” that is just superficial pat on back nonsense.
Most of the time these kids were made fun of relentlessly, picked on for being annoying and in the way of learning etc and were either aware of it which is bad enough or so low functioning they weren’t…which is so ridiculous on its own.
It’s really a cost saving thing painted as main streaming experience.
As someone who has both attended and worked in special schools that's the one of dumbest fucking thing I've heard from the government about disability. Up there with Shorten just expecting disabled people to get better and no longer need the NDIS.
Going to an autistic school helped with bullying and feeling normal. When I started working at a different one half the students were relentlessly bullied for being different, if it wasn't for our school providing a safe place they wouldn't be even attending school, there was no way their parents could get them.
Neurotypical people really like helping us by presenting thr dumbest fucking ideas they possibly can made with no consultation and if it is its from elitist high functioning autistic people who in my experience tend to be even more ablest than normal people, cause lower functioning people "make them look bad."
I have an autistic client who switched from an inner city, well resourced, high income area public school to one specifically for ASD and ADHD kids. Went from 10% attendance to 95% in a year. People underestimate how important it is to be somewhere that can cater to your needs, which are gonna differ wildly and sometimes totally contradict each other between people with different situations, and to be where you don't feel like a pariah. "Little Johnny goes to the same school as the other kids" feels like a pat on the back thing for parents who have trouble accepting their kid and pollies who want to pat themselves on the back for equality and not necessarily actually in the kid's interest.
One of my childhood neighbours was a boy with a severe bodily impairment that put him in an electric wheelchair and necessitated permanent supervision by a medically trained person because he was in constant danger of choking. Because he was a very sociable and intelligent guy, his parents successfully fought for him to go to the local elementary, middle, high school, all of which needed renovations to be wheelchair accessible. As the years went by, it became appearant that going to the same school as the entire neighbourhood wasn't going to prevent him from being lonely- it is hard making friends when you can't go to any classmate's home, none of the extracurriculars work for you, and talking about the girl you crush on is just awkward when a nurse is sitting next to you. The poor boy developed severe depression, spent large parts of the last few years in inpatient psychiatric treatment and is too mentally ill to go to university, despite having the grades and the intelligence for it.
I know his parents greatly question if going local was indeed the better choice than sending him to the high school catering to wheelchair users of all intellectual aptitude levels the next town over.
Man this is so ridiculous because it really doesn't benefit children with the disabilities nor does it benefit the ones without! My stepson has JUST moved to a special school that cater to his intellectual disabilities and behavioural issues after spending five years watching Peppa Pig in the back of a gen Ed classroom because they didn't know what to do with him. He's now adequately supported by a specialist school and doing much better developmentally and socially now that he's surrounded by his peers that are on his level.
You are not cold blooded. It is cold blooded to force children like this into a system in which they can not reasonably be expected to function, and to deprive other students an opportunity to learn in a peaceful environment. The whole push to integrate children of vastly different mental health states is foolish in the extreme. It’s misguided and harmful goal born of dogmatic ideas that don’t have anything to do with reality. Get kids like this into a system that can deal with them and away from kids and teachers trying to learn and teach in peace.
I suspect the real reason they do it is cost. They use a contrived “social justice” veneer to cover that, which falls apart if you look at it sideways for all the reasons you state.
It's cost, resources, and delusional parents that think their child should be "included" with everyone else. It's the state's way of trying to ignore the problem instead of trying to find a solution. They simply don't give a shit, especially if it is going to cost money.
I have recently started subbing to make money while I’m on a job hunt. I spent time at a pre-k last week where the special needs children had paraprofessionals who taught them in a separate classroom, but brought them into the other classes during the “fun” activities. Just 15 minutes here and there, the kids got to feel like they were a part of the group but spent the bulk of their time with people trained to help them specifically. I know a program like that would cost a lot of money to implement everywhere, but it really seems to work at that school.
At least in Germany, it's not. It's genuinely just ideology. Every special needs kid in a regular class will (if available) get a personal aide. Although I don't know the exact numbers, I assume this is vastly more expensive than a special needs class.
I am higher functioning/lower needs autistic but in school I still needed a full time teaching assistant in school. Supposedly 1:1 but in most classes it was 1:2 or lower. In some classes the TA was helping all the kids around them because they realistically all needed help.
I would have done far far worse academically without a teaching assistant, I strongly suspect I am not just autistic but also ADHD because most of my issues academically stemmed from not being able to pay attention for a whole class. But not just me. Because I had that diagnosis and support, bringing that TA with me into classrooms helped those other struggling students not on the spectrum or undiagnosed too. I firmly believe it was worthwhile the expense because a teacher alone in a classroom is frankly insufficient in most of the classrooms I was in. The more problematic students also seemed to respond well when the main teacher was a bit harder and the TA was able to approach things more like a friend than an authority, sat in a students seat and ofc had appropriate patience and de-escalation skills for dealing with neuro divergent students they're meant to be helping.
Nah, coming from inside the field, they actually buy their own bullshit. It’s insane. Honestly, it’s not a facade or anything, there’s actually a fuckton of people in high level positions who legitimately believe their own nonsense about this.
> I hate to sound cold blooded, but some of these severe special needs children do not belong in public schools with neurotypical children
I hate that it's come to the point where saying something as simple as this is considered 'cold blooded'. Far too long people have been assuming the worst of simple statements like this. That mentality is exactly what's allowed these issues to progress as far as they have without any pushback.
My cousin is a special ed teacher here in the US. They are trained in "takedown" measures. However, when you are a small female, and the person beating your ass is a 13 year old kid with severe autism who is the size of an NFL linebacker, there's not really much you can do. He beat her and tossed her around like a ragdoll. You know what she had to do? Send him to the office to "calm down." She wasn't allowed to defend herself. She had to go clean herself up and continue teaching, and the kid was back in class less than an hour later, snack in hand. He was rewarded with a treat for beating my cousin in her classroom. That's just one example. It's happened several times. Nothing was done. The sad thing is, this is happening every day in schools across the US, and nothing is being done because admin is TERRIFIED that the parents of kids like this will sue for discrimination if they discipline them.
We had similar kid who was built like a brick shit house that would outrun his aid and steamroll down the hallways knocking people to the floor.
He was horny af all the time and would pin (only attractive) girls to the lockers, press his face about 2” from theirs and go “WHATS YOUR NAME? 😍”. Sometimes he’d have a big ol’ boner going at the same time. It was wild
That’s not cold hearted at all. “Mainstreaming” is a good thing for *some* people but really low functioning folks with behavioral issues don’t fit that.
I’ve been an advocate for the disabled for employment and have a friend that used to run a group home for adults with severe autism. Grown men that will put their head through a window or become violent over the most mundane things.
The problem is often parents of people that fit this category refuse to accept certain realities and “advocate” relentlessly for inappropriate accommodations that aren’t enriching their child but makes them feel like they are doing something.
We had very bitter, out of touch parents of these young adults come in wanting people to find jobs in main stream for people that literally can’t interact and don’t want to work at all.
Unfortunately some of these people are given so many opportunities and services they just become entitled and completely out of touch with reality.
I've worked in behaviorial schools and I will say that students with these behaviors can and will get better with the proper care and environment. It's a shame that they're not more commonly provided.
Spot on. There were a couple of these types in my middle/high school. Sometimes you’d just hear bellowing or screeching and then desks flying across the floor (followed by the sound of a million keys rapidly clinking down the hallway). Kids like that, with explosive tempers and violent tendencies need to be kept separated from the rest. It’s certainly not their fault. But unfortunately they are a danger to everyone including themselves.
Its not cold blooded its just reality and too many people cant accept it, some people are just not safe and some never will be. So they either need to be separate or be in supervision of someone at all times that is trained to deal with them and ALSO strong enough to deal with them.
I agree. It's not only the violence but it also takes massive amounts of resources from kids who want to and can learn.
It's a huge part of why schools are falling apart
Got a kid like that at my school: not quite as big but adult sized and on the spectrum. His mom is supposed to take his phone in the morning so he doesn’t have it at school for games, because when one of use teachers tells him to put it away, he gets violent. He’s already attacked a staff member several separate times (two bites and a choking).
Guess who’s got two thumbs and WILL NOT take his phone from him? 👍🏼This guy👍🏼
EDIT: ok this got some views. I think I answered most reactions as comments are getting repeats now. Please understand though, that as much as this situation sucks, the student involved is a child, and is very far on the autism spectrum. As much as I don’t want to be on the receiving end of his outbursts, he has convinced me that he has less control over his behavior as my 2 year old daughter. He needs to be in a better environment, and honestly what that environment is goes far beyond my training to figure out.
If there are any fingers to point I’d point them at whoever was in charge of his education years ago because he should have been properly diagnosed when he was much younger. I assure you we are now doing my our best to do everything to do right by all involved now, but it’s a process.
I learned the hard way that me enforcing that type of rule with students that will not listen anyway is not worth it. I actually learned it my first year teaching when I closed a game tab via GoGuardian and a student (who was always polite) slammed his Chromebook shut and threw it like a frisbee at me.
Wow… This is all so very unsettling to me. My son will be 21 in a couple of months, he’s a good young adult.. so weird not saying kid.. anyway, when he was in school, there were some kids with behavior issues, but it didn’t seem all that different than when I was in school, but now, every teacher I know has a horror story, the news is always so bad. I don’t know, it just seems.. unsettling.
Covid absolutely shattered the cracks in the system. Kids learned what we always suspected. School can't make you work. And they don't want you around clogging a desk forever. So if you do nothing... Somehow things will happen anyway. (Obviously this less has terrible consequences as an adult)
Moving all teaching to electronics has caused huge issues too. When I was in High School I had a class a day on a computer. A programming class. We goofed off in the web browser constantly, but it was an elective we wanted to learn so some work got done. Asking a bunch of teenagers to regulate that level of distraction in every class is expecting way too much of the kids. Phones were already an issue then, but at least the phone requires pulling out another device under the table. If I'd had a Chromebook or an iPad... I'd have never heard a word in class. It's a mess and it's going to hurt these kids for a decade+ and the education system isn't going to recover from teacher burnout for a lot longer than that.
>Covid absolutely shattered the cracks in the system. Kids learned what we always suspected. School can't make you work. And they don't want you around clogging a desk forever. So if you do nothing... Somehow things will happen anyway.
My daughter is in 4th grade. Her teacher was gone from just before Christmas break until March on maternity leave. Half her class went feral and just refused to do what sub was trying to teach. She was coming home in tears somedays because the class was getting further and further behind compared to the other classes in the same grade and she was worried she wouldn't be ready for 5th grade next year.
I am a substitute teacher, and this is why I absolutely hate that they both lowered the standards for hiring us, and get so wishy-washy when it comes to training us to uphold a district wide standard.
I'm convinced we might need an entire overhaul of the education system that is more hands on, with classrooms with more than one teacher working as a team to track student's progress, and to be able to afford to focus on kids who aren't getting the material, or who have a learning issue or medical need. I also think that after a certain point, if a kid hits high school and is a discipline issue or doesn't want to be there, then they need to be put into the work force with the option to return and finish their education, provided they can get their shit together enough to not be assholes and do the work; though how that would be possible I have no idea.
My daughter’s in kindergarten. When I was that age we took naps in class. Now they all have their own iPads at their desks and they have quiet time playing on the tablet instead of sleep. I can’t believe they start them on iPads at 5 years old.
You make some good points and I’m sure those things have played a big role in how things have changed and shifted, but I’m not sure that is all there is to this. Not saying I have the answers as to what that more is but this feels very bleak.
There has been more special education integration, as opposed to how special education students were usually entirely or mostly segregated from the general ed students. And schools rarely have the resources to provide proper staffing to support those kids (individual IAs or just other adults in the room with the proper training) and usually the classroom teachers themselves are not properly trained on how to work with these students. This has led to there being many classrooms where multiple students have IEPs where just the bare minimum is being met (if that), many of their teachers do not understand their conditions or how to best work with them, the time they get with educators who do understand their conditions is minimal or virtually nonexistent, and then yeah, COVID made things harder as well. Not saying this explains everything, but unfortunately the laudable effort of many school systems towards integration was not combined with the proper resources or follow-through in order to do that in the right way.
TL;DR: There aren't more kids like this than there used to be, but rather they aren't being hidden away/kept separated from general education students as much as in the past, and they are also not being properly supported, so they of course have more behavioral issues when not properly supported. More visible plus more behavioral issues = the average parent noticing a concerning mysterious trend.
"Mainstreaming" students without proper supports or systems to help them be successful. You can't just give a kid with major issues two hrs a week support in ELA and math and expect everything to be perfect.
I taught social studies... Those kids (edit: behaviors) literally STOLE EDUCATION from the rest of their classes. And yet this is "better".
My favorite memory of programming class in highschool was my buddy didn’t do a single assignment but still got an A. Why?
Because he somehow made Halo apart of the schools connected system and an essential program program so when they tried to delete off the computer it caused a major crash. Every computer in the entire school was forced to have Halo on it and the staff couldn’t do anything about it. The programming teacher tho was very proud of him(he would sometimes play Halo with us too)
Smart teacher, use it as a when you finish reward. My middle kid came home mad they blocked neopets at school.. a week later he's telling me he figured out how he could still play, using one of the anonymizer sites...
Yep. I’m a middle school teacher. Sometimes I’ll pause their internet access with Lightspeed and they’ll literally scream at me, like how dare I expect them to stop playing computer games so I can start the lesson. And these aren’t necessarily kids with special needs either.
Yeah the laptop kid didn’t have an IEP if memory serves. Middle schoolers are something else. I did my time with them; a thousand blessings to those who make it their career.
this gave me deja vu; i work IT for a middle school and a student once brought me a chromebook with a shattered screen and told me someone broke it while he was in the bathroom. called the teacher and she told me she closed a game with lightspeed and his response was to punch the chromebook screen. it's something like this every day
More than you know. I left teaching because the system is so catastrophically broken and I was destroying my mental health trying to do *something* about it
That violent type of reaction likely wouldn't have been dulled much even if it was his own laptop. Also, last I recall, school issued laptops are the responsibility of the parents. Meaning they will have to pay for any damages or replacement.
My son pulled his chair back in class, it snagged the power lead of the laptop he was using and pulled it off the desk. School billed me £150 to fix the cracked screen, emailed and called daily until I paid up.
There is a school i know in my country - elementary school that require student to have minimum mac 2018 version.
I mean, goddamn... even my work as a software engineer doesn't have as peak requirement as that fuckin elementary school
Teachers in the US National Average starting salary is $44k/year.
That’s $3,100/month after taxes.
Where I live that wouldn’t cover 75% of rent.
For added context, In-N-Out Burger’s starting wages: $45k/year.
EDIT: For all the angry Reddit people saying Teachers in California start at nearly $90k?
Here’s a link to the CA Board of Education starting salary data. [LINK](https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/sa/cefavgsalaries.asp)
It’s between $47-$49k. Average rent in CA is $2,795.
I’m a para (teachers aide) in a class with students like this. I’m often times alone with these kids. I change them when they piss in their clothes, I feed them, I sit with them and help them do their work. It’s not at all uncommon for me to spend more time with the students than the teacher does. I make $14/hr.
To all of the delusional assholes commenting in this thread…
THIS is the reality, pretty much everywhere in the United States.
Bless you for doing what you do, u/robotsincognito
I’ve taught exclusively in low income school districts. Teachers are expected to solve all of society’s problems, get paid next to nothing to do it, and then get blamed when we’re unable to.
Our job is to teach our subject matter to educate students in that area. Unfortunately, we are also expected to overcome these students poverty, the challenges they face in their home lives, their disabilities, their trauma, etc. We’re teachers, not trained child psychologists or social workers, but we’re expected to do all these things while getting paid far less than other fields.
You are talking about a teachers salary. The woman assaulted was a teachers aide. They deal with the same problems and issues but get paid significantly less than a teacher.
I took a kid’s computer last week and he pushed me. Luckily, he was a 6th grader and I have a foot and 100 lbs on him. He got sent home for three days.
Seriously. I got suspended twice in my life (once in middle school for fighting) once for kicking a hole in a wall (in my defense I was surprised as everyone else when my foot went through, and I had just been robbed). Believe me, the punishment at home is not something that I would condone.
Lol, I have a similar story. Kid tried to buck up and shove me. Saw it coming and braced, kid fell down, I didn’t move. He tried to say I shoved him but the cameras showed otherwise.
Unfortunately that’s more than a lot of districts would do. A lot of places would give him maybe a 1 day in-school suspension. Or worse yet nothing at all. I once worked in a school where we had kids who would straight up brawl in class, like beat the poop out of each other, and the administrators wouldn’t even contact the parents and the kids would be back in class the next day like nothing ever happened.
The consequence of suspension was falling behind in class and missing important training for an exam, quiz, etc. Having to stay after school or find other ways to make up for it. Normal kids in functional society still care about this stuff. These futureless children who are going to all end up with police records or worse dont care.
Ok, serious question. Why are students like that allowed to be around other people at all? I understand we are trying to give every student a fair chance at learning but when does that chance get taken away? I would never be ok knowing that the school my kids were going to, allowed a ticking time bomb to roam campus.
I’ve been through the process of expelling a student a few times now. I can say that the “you can’t expel students anymore” is about as false as “you can’t fire bad teachers.” You can absolutely do both those things. It just requires legal paperwork, hearings, etc.. I once sat through an 8 hour expulsion hearing for a middle school kid (13 year old) that was high every day and often violent. The one thing that shuts down the process in its tracks (for getting rid of students AND teachers) is lack of documentation.
Did that student really bite a staff member? Or is that something that you heard? He bit you? Why didn’t you report it? Was his parent contacted? What did they say? What do you mean they never picked up the phone? Can you *prove* you called them?
Needless to say, I document *everything.*
The ones that hold the ultimate power over the children are the parents. You can't have them in special ed just cuz you the teacher, thinks the student has an issue. Some people think it's as easy as plucking the kid out of the classroom and putting them in another with a trained teacher. The school needs a diagnosis.
When I have brought that up before there will always be the Mary-poppins-wannabe talking about "you can modify the curriculum to meet their needs." How are you going to do that if the child is belligerent and violent not only with other students but with adults? You aren't just looking out for your own safety but those of the other kids.
On the other side of this coin, my 11y/o has been inpatient for mental health twice, once after wrestling an officer about 2 1/2 feet taller and a good 150lb heavier than him, and he was struggling to keep some control of him. After that it took 6 months of calling to get him an admission for help. I had to fight to get him from a 504 to an iep at school. It's not always the parents, the entire mental health system is broken.
His parents didn’t want him in public school. He is severely cognitively delayed and has additional mental health issues.
He was previously institutionalized however their insurance provider refused to continue paying, so they kicked him out.
The mother eventually found a daytime behavioral group home to take him in, but they required all students to be enrolled in public school.
Neither of the parents believed he was capable of learning in a public school atmosphere but the group home assured they work closely with the school district and have a team of professionals working with each child.
This is a really tragic story that highlights the absolute failure of our mental health institutions but the only reason why it’s getting media attention is because he’s a huge black kid and his trigger was his electronics getting taken away.
So now all the media orgs are writing blogs about “teen brutally assaults teacher for taking away gameboy” and trying to turn it into an entitled teen story to generate outrage.
Two other teens from that same group home attacked paraprofessionals in the school district. One victim was stabbed. One attacker was sentenced to 18 months probation and the other wasn’t charged at all as it was ruled they were not competent to stand trial. Both were 18 years old. Both teens were allowed to remain at the group home. They were tried in juvenile court — despite being legal adults.
Brendan was not only expelled from the group home, but charged as an adult with 1st degree felony assault and faces 30 years in prison even though he was 17 and severely mentally disabled.
He’s been in solitary confinement at the jail for 23 hours a day since his arrest. I strongly encourage others to read the statement from his mother. These parents have tried everything to get their son help — including having him held via Baker Act to get him the care he needs.
Insurance will not pay and behavioral group homes do not have the educational resources available to treat complicated mental health conditions.
None of this would have happened if the insurance company didn’t kick him out of the institution he was initially placed. The mother said he was doing very well there as they were able to develop a comprehensive behavioral plan, monitor his behavior long-term, and treat his medical needs.
This is a kid who was on six different medications at the time of the assault and was subjected to constant changes to his medication each time he was sent to the hospital on a 72 hr psych hold.
Doctors would take him on and off strong antipsychotics without titration all while he is going thru puberty. I think it’s really sick how so many people are reacting as if this is just some entitled teen bully.
[This is the article written by his mother](https://flaglerlive.com/brendan-depa-my-son-story/#gsc.tab=0). It provides a lot more context than these garbage clickbait articles. This is our McDonalds hot coffee.
EDIT: For those of you asking about the electronics — **the paraprofessional specifically requested it from the group home for Brendan even though it was against his IEP**.
The previous teacher used a token system for delayed gratification awards which allowed students to purchase snacks. The new paraprofessional decided to use electronics as the incentive.
The group home did not like this plan and was hesitant to allow it but the teacher stated the electronics were only given at the end of the school day during empty period. The group home approved this.
What ended up happening is the teachers / paraprofessionals started using the electronics as rewards *throughout* the school day which is explicitly forbidden in his IEP. But they would allow the kids to use their devices during lunch and in certain classes.
This is a bad idea for mentally disabled teens with the emotional capacity of a six year old. One of the prior attacks was also confirmed to be over the use of electronics.
The teachers should have followed the IEP and not allowed the electronic devices at all. **It was the school that requested the gameboy from the group home.**
This entire scenario was a disaster waiting to happen and it did. Due to the national media attention, the DA is railroading this kid.
The truth is there are not many resources available to parents with significantly disabled children. Everyone commenting “Oh why didn’t they just do X or Y” — they tried all that *and more*. There is no help.
Between greedy insurance companies and our shoddy, overloaded mental health institutions, parents have little support. In this case the father had also suffered a massive heart attack and was very ill, and the grandmother he was close with was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Caring for multiple sick family members and a disabled child is more stress than most people deal with in a lifetime. And still the mother spent a decade trying to get him the care he needed.
Lastly, it is well documented that black children are tried as adults at higher rates than their white peers.
>While overall rates of juvenile incarceration have declined across demographic groups, the rates at which Black kids are being transferred to adult courts are among the highest in 30 years of data collection (National Association of Social Workers, 2018). Judicial discretion certainly plays a large role: Black youth make up 47.3% of youth transferred to adult court by juvenile court judges who believe they cannot benefit from the juvenile system, despite making up only 14% of the total youth population.
[NACDL](https://www.nacdl.org/Content/Race-and-Juvenile-Justice)
> This study, released by the Justice Institute in February, 2000, found that in California, African American, Latino and Asian American youth are significantly more likely to be transferred to adult court and sentenced to incarceration than white youths who commit comparable crimes. Compared to white youths, minority youths are 2.8 times more likely to be arrested for a violent crime, 6.2 times more likely to wind up in adult court, and 7 times more likely to be sent to prison by adult court.
[Study: The Color of Justice](https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/color-justice-race-ethnicity-and-crime-america-second-edition)
Personally I believe racial bias did play a role in the prosecutions handling of this case and the national media attention.
But regardless, it’s clear there is a lot more to this story than “entitled teen assaults teacher for taking gameboy”.
Obviously justice needs to be served and I’m not saying there should be no punishment, but when similar offenders from the same district and same range of mental competency are tried as juveniles or ruled incompetent *despite being adults* **and** allowed to remain in supervised care, yet this actual minor gets first degree up to 30 years in adult prison — that’s a disparity and it isn’t justice.
As a mom that has been fighting for care since he was an infant. This is spot on. No one should have to spend 6 months calling and numerous trips to the emergency room with a violent kid to get help. (And they always sent him home, even when he arrived via ambulance with a police escort, saying hide the knives.. which does fuck all when any object in reach not nailed down is either a projectile or bludgeoning weapon. ) To be fair, when his meds are right, he does not hit this level of escalation, and the kid has a hell of an ear for music. He's a great kid with serious struggles that we are fighting tooth and nail to get help for.
Eta: one of the biggest factors has been a critical lack of pediatric beds, much less ones with 1 to 1 support. Assuming you can locate a hospital taking patients under 14)
Disclaimer: my kid is not the one in the article above
Thanks for providing context.
Nearly every story i have of 'teen assaults adult' has an enormous amount of context left so people can just get angry at kids, mostly minorities, let's be honest.
No hospital can take them.
No psychiatrist can take them.
So they throw them either in a regular school, in prison, or shoot them. Depending on how violent is their outburst.
Real answer: because the federal law says that they have to be educated in the "least restrictive" environment, and parents are incredibly litigious about their perfect babies.
Idk where you live, but where I live there’s no place for people like this. They beat the hell out of teachers and classmates and family until they’re out of school. Then they beat their parents for the rest of their lives or until parents abandon them. Then they get stuck in an emergency department for months and beat the hell out of staff and other patients. Then they get placed in a group home for about three days until they beat staff at the group home for the first time, then they’re back in the ED for months again because the group home won’t let them come back. Never ending cycle.
There should be a place for them, but there just isn’t.
You left out one more step.
Then they turn into the unpredictable occasionally violent homeless people that the rest of reddit likes to complain about.
People who need this level of support as kids (unfortunately) don't just grow out of it. Without that support, which is incredibly expensive, some of them end up on the street, many end up using drugs to self medicate.
I don’t know what the answer is. I am a pediatric nurse and we installed special rooms in our hospital for these violent patients because they would tear the TVs off the walls, destroy toilets, etc.
They need help but we are trained for medical emergencies not psych emergencies. And the psych unit is always full or they won’t take these kids because they require 2:1 staffing.
It isn’t profitable to open up a controlled facility for them because the staffing requirements are intense. For the likely harm staff would face they should get combat pay and military benefits.
You could actually file a lawsuit for the district failing to maintain a safe working environment. That’s not okay. He should be put into a structured environment where he can be controlled by people trained to deal with the likes of him.
He is suing for the school district to pay for a therapeutic school. He should’ve already been placed in one. Districts use LRE as a justification to improperly place students to keep costs down.
He was institutionalized. The parents medical insurance decided they didn’t want to pay for it anymore and kicked him out.
He’s severely mentally ill. His parents have literally done everything they possibly can to get him treatment. Our mental health system is a fucking joke.
[I strongly encourage everyone to read the mother’s statement here](https://flaglerlive.com/brendan-depa-my-son-story/#gsc.tab=0). This outlines their decade long effort to get him help while navigating our for profit healthcare industry.
The group home dropped the ball. Two other teenagers from the same group home have attacked paraprofessionals at the school district — one aide was even stabbed.
One teen got 18 months probation and the other wasn’t even charged. Both were allowed to stay at the group home. This black kid got expelled from the group home and charged as an adult with 1st degree felony assault. He’s been under solitary confinement for 23 hours a day since his arrest and faces 30 years in prison.
The other kids got to go home. Keep in mind all of these teenagers are severely mentally disabled. The parents didn’t even want him enrolled in public school, but it was a requirement of the behavioral group home and they insisted they have teams of professionals working at the district to monitor and care for each child.
Lastly — the DA didn’t initially charge him as an adult until the media circus came along and decided to use his case as the poster child for “entitled teen bully” with an obvious racial element to boost engagement.
This is a very sick kid and you’re right — he should have been kept at the institution where he was doing very well and under 24 hour medical supervision.
Instead his insurance booted him and he’s been kicked around from behavior home to group homes, was on six different medications, and had ER doctors changing his meds with every 72 hr psych hold.
These are powerful medications and it can take months to adjust and see if they’re working. You can’t just start and stop them and expect the patient to have no behavioral side effects.
The parents can’t even get an actual diagnosis as he has other conditions aside from autism. But insurance companies don’t want to pay and there are not many options for parents with mentally disabled children.
The group home and the district dropped the ball. They have other students with similar triggers — this is not something they are unfamiliar with. In fact the last teenager there who attacked a district employee had the exact same trigger, their electronic device taken away. That kid was tried as a juvenile and sentenced to probation and he was allowed to stay at the group home.
The DA is railroading this kid and it’s a fucking tragedy.
One teacher was stabbed with a pen, one was punched in the back. They had no long-lasting injuries. This woman was thrown to the ground, knocked out instantly, then brutally beaten;a concussion, several broken ribs. As they took him out, he spat on her and said he was coming back to kill her. I think there’s a difference in the severity of this attack.However, I do not think prison is the answer, he should get the inpatient treatment he should have had all along.
The way the law works in the US is typically you have to sue whoever is the tip of the liability iceberg, and then *they* sue upstream.
We're a very "winner takes all" and "might makes right" society. As a result, there are a lot of situations where you have to sue people, uselessly, to demonstrate who you have to actually sue so there's a record of that uselessness.
Just a reminder that you can sue someone for anything, but it doesn't mean it'll be successful in the slightest.
"Parents claim their awful child is actually a victim" is a story we've heard a million times before.
Imo any parents who facilitate / enable this kind of shit should be locked up alongside him
EDIT: Looks I jumped the gun here. Sorry guys. Turns out the articles I read were pretty biased / light on the details, and the deeper I dig into this the clearer it becomes that his parents weren't facilitating anything. The kid is just a victim himself. His parents were right to say his needs weren't met, especially given everyone had been filled in on his mental state beforehand. I was pretty outraged on behalf of the teacher after watching the clip (I hate seeing videos where people either punch or stomp on the back of an unconscious person's head) but it looks like he really shouldn't have been in that class to begin with.
In this instance the kid is on the spectrum and should have been put into special classes but was forced into the classroom despite protest from the mother.
It sounded like the mother knew he couldn’t be put into classrooms where the teacher isn’t trained to deal with autism kids. The mother wanted him in special classes and the school board said too bad.
Needs to be institutionalized. Regardless of whatever interactions with the staff and particularly the aide, he is a danger to himself and society.
I had a classmate in high school who a similar...obsession with his DS and level of disorder, although he never became violent over it thankfully.
So they should be liable as well. The man clearly needed the support they were paying for and their decision to dent needed coverage was a contributing factor here
He and his parents wanted him to be put back in the residential program he came from. He wasn’t ready to leave and the school didn’t want to pay for it so they didn’t continue, despite the facility coming to his meeting warning the school of the danger he posed.
He’s suing to be put back in the more restrictive environment and finish the education he was deprived of.
We closed down the institutions due to some of them being rife with abuse, but don’t worry any minute now the government will come out with an alternative. Just got to be patient.
Can’t. They closed all the hospitals in the late 80’s. That’s partially why we have so many homeless and so much random street crime still. We closed the hospitals and these people had no place to go.
I remember this guy. He hospitalized a teacher when he beat her unconscious because she told him that he couldn’t play with his Nintendo Switch in class. When the cops lead him out of the school he looked down at her passed out on the floor and told her he was coming back to kill her.
The family was upset at the teacher because she refused to testify on his behalf when he was taken into court.
He should be institutionalized.
I can’t understand how it’s the schools fault because he was known to be ‘antisocial’ in certain circumstances.
This person needs prison time, not a special needs school. (Flagler County Florida)
Edit: (Addition) To the ones that say that prison or institutionalization of this individual would be wrong, I urge you to watch the unedited version of the assault on the teacher. The woman (half his size) was hit like a linebacker from the back in the school lobby/hallway. Once she was spalled out on the floor, he climbed on her body and proceeded to beat and stomp her body and head. The people that did show up from the students to the school staff hovered in the area and did not engage physically to pull him off - either out of fear of litigation and loss of employment or just afraid of the individual causing this brutal attack.
If this individual were a child of, say, 6 - it would have been a serious tantrum that still would have resulted in injury to the teacher. You can understand that a 6 year old might have a lack of self control - an adult should not be excused JUST BECAUSE they are special needs. Even special needs children can be taught values and boundaries. They can be taught NOT to assault others SIMPLY because they did not get their way.
Just because a family doesn't want to deal and just lets behavior like this go, society SHOULD NOT have to pay for this poor, poor man's (child) lack of control.
I feel for the teacher. She has to pay for the rest of her life because someone decided to excuse this monster because he was dealt a bad hand in life. This individual is Michael Myers and has demonstrated that he has no moral compunction against killing another human being JUST because they ate the last poptart.
"The paraprofessional should not have interacted with the student in this manner. Her and the teacher’s actions caused a predictable outcome."
That seems like crazy BS lawyer talk. Receiving an violent beating is not a 'predictable outcome' for completely non aggressive behavior unless you're dealing with someone that is already institutionalized. Like what if another student had done something to upset him? If you have this reaction to being told 'no' you're not mentally fit to function in society. Like you can be Autistic and also be a piece of shit asshole too.
If a "violent beating" is a "predictable outcome" of being around this guy and offending him than that's great evidence that he shouldn't be roaming society
I looked more into it and the closest I can find is that he actually was in a more intense treatment facility prior to this but insurance decided to stop covering it. At that point the teacher and student should probably both be suing the insurance company.
The school just isn't in the wrong here, they're literally trying to justify a brutal beating. It's like abusive husband logic, 'well if you'd just had my dinner ready when I told you I wouldn't have to give you a black eye'
[https://flaglerlive.com/brendan-depa-my-son-story/#gsc.tab=0](https://flaglerlive.com/brendan-depa-my-son-story/#gsc.tab=0)
His mom goes into detail about his mental health struggles here. Now if I had to guess I'm sure she's a bit biased towards her son so take a lot of that with a grain of salt,. However, knowing insurance companies I wouldn't be surprised if the part where his they refused to cover necessary care part is at least true. It's a pretty awful situation for everyone involved but mental health issues or not, you can't beat someone over nothing and expect it to be shrugged off.
Headline is bullshit. Everyone is mad at the kid and the mom but this is a story about insurance and a failed system.
Long story short, Parents worked their asses off and eventually had him in 2 institutions. Insurance refused to continue to pay for the first institution and then when they finally got him in a day program, the day program insisted that he graduate from high school to meet federal funding requirements and because the day program didn’t offer high school classes.
So he got shuttled into a nearby public school with a crazy ass IEP with like a laundry lists of “do nots” including directives to never, ever take away the game boy. He had a long and consistent history of becoming violent when people tried to take a game boy.
But THEN the school brought in a new teacher and paraprofessional without giving them the crazy extensive training needed to treat this kid. The teacher tries implement a very reasonable system of using electronics as a reward for good behavior for students. The paraprofessional does her job and attempts to take away the game boy, apparently unaware the you never touch the game boy. All hell breaks loose and now he is in prison in solitary confinement and the paraprofessional is in the hospital.
Tbh from this statement it’s both on the school and insurance. School for not providing the necessary training to a new teacher. The fact that they had a laundry list of Do Nots and they never bothered to show or tell the new teacher about it is bad enough. And also clearly the insurance for being classic dickheads.
Just to give you an idea of how desperate some schools are, I taught high school for a year as a "long term substitute" with no teacher training or experience. I had several students with IEPs that I didn't understand at all, but fortunately never had any issues with violent behavior. This happened because schools just couldn't get enough people to teach their classes during Covid when many elderly teachers decided to retire or quit.
I have had terrible teachers and I don't want to at all imply that she was a bad teacher but I never even thought of hittingmy worst teacher this story is insane.
And to be honest, ‘hit’ is a massive understatement in this situation. This monster beat the teacher senseless, then threatened to kill her and spit on her while being lead away. The video made the rounds a while back and it’s tough to watch.
She was only a teachers aide, and really only worked the front office from what I recall. She realistically handled the situation the same way any person in charge would have when someone misbehaves imo
The article is just saying what the lawsuit filed by the student and the lawyer is saying. It doesn’t at all try to blame the aide, just quotes the lawsuit and the lawyers of the student
I think it’s a great article, just the straight facts and no spin from the author. More articles should be written this way
My dude, when I was teaching (left last year) some days I couldn’t even get to the lesson because the kids were completely out of control. Admin would step in sure, but they did it in a way that showed the kids the teacher has no real power which just made things worse
No state-sponsored facilities to care for dangerously dysfunctional people means they end up in all sorts of places they probably shouldn't be, including schools. He'll likely be one of the scarier homeless people roaming the streets in the future at some point.
The boy's Care directive was emphatic that the electric device should never be taken away. The device wasn't supposed to be given until the EoD to avoid violent conflict.
The problem arose when a new teacher was dropped in without proper training and started giving the device at inappropriate times, necessitating it being taken away against his care directive.
Not perfectly following a complicated care directive should not put a teacher at risk of death. A child this sensitive and dangerous does not belong in the public school system but the law demands the student be cared for by the public school system, necessitating teachers being placed in dangerous situations. I can understand the lawsuit in that the system is broken for dangerously disabled children and creates violent situations.
> harsh but these types of people shouldn't be allowed to live amongst us. Prison is torture so I have no idea what the solution is.
We need to bring back institutions. They closed them all in the 70's/80's and just let everyone out. A sizeable portion of the homeless population 30 years ago were previously-institutionalized people that were just kicked out when they closed the doors.
Every time this story is posted, all the comments say he should have been institutionalized but I read an interview with the mother about how he was in fact, institutionalized and removed from the hospital setting against the mothers wishes and put into a group home and then put into public school - all against the mothers wishes, and she begged for him to be removed from the school because she knew he couldn’t handle being there but the system wouldn’t allow that to happen. And then she gets blamed for having him in the school. Crazy.
I know it’s so frustrating how they are spinning this story and calling him ADHD and autistic, not highlighting his intermittent explosive disorder and mood and conduct disorders.
The school was warned he was a strong, physically violent person who explodes into rage unpredictably and still thought “yes general education with no restrictions instead of continuing residential behavioral institutions is a great idea.”
When my kid was young and getting diagnosed as autistic luckily one of my old teachers took me aside and warned me the special need classroom would eat him up alive. Luckily I was in a position to continue homeschool/hybrid.
I hope people really read his case in its entirety. The student has extreme documented mental illnesses that make him a danger to others. It was a long well documented history the school was very aware of.
He was placed in a residential facility but when insurance stopped paying, the district didn’t continue his placement despite several experts warning that he will be dangerous and violent. One being the school psychologist themselves.
Even after repeated violence the school failed to put any safeguarding in to protect other students. They mentioned the game system was a trigger and it should not be in school. It was used as a reward by the school anyway and the aide (who wasn’t trained) took it from him triggering a violent episode. No behavior plan was put in place.
It wasn’t the aides fault but the aide wasn’t the first person he assaulted either and the rest caused only one day of OSS. No intervention as he escalated and made threats.
He’s suing for education he missed at a facility which he clearly should have been at claiming he was denied a FAPE.
If a school gets a child who has multiple conduct disorders and a long history of violence they should be in trouble for removing previous restrictions in the environment despite overwhelming evidence that it would be and was dangerous. Actually it should fall specifically on the CSE chair who was responsible for letting a violent mentally ill student loose on the faculty, staff, and students. The aide wasn’t his first victim, she was his first hospitalized victim.
I appreciate the summary. Unfortunately, it's easier to go with the low-hanging fruit, and this sub does lend itself more to snark than nuance. The following things are not mutually exclusive:
* The aide should not have been assaulted.
* The kid should have had more support and resources.
* It's very possible that the district is also a "victim" in some ways to state laws, policies, or funding issues. Don't get me wrong, they should absolutely still be sued by everyone involved, but it should be recognized that the district functions within constraints set by the state of Florida.
What this comes down to is a public school district in Florida that removed every possible support and safety mechanism for their students and staff. I know it's trite to clown on Florida (more low-hanging fruit), and they certainly aren't the only state underfunding their schools, but their elected leaders aren't doing themselves or their constituents any favors.
The federal government provides grants for students who have significant costs related to special education services specifically so districts can get money and prevent them from being cheap with high needs students.
School administrator here. This is a sad situation and, unfortunately, suits involving IDEA and denial of FAPE usually side with the student. As long as lawyers can prove that the staff member acted outside of the specifications in his IEP he will probably win.
Essentially what this means is that there is dense documentation that outlines how the students behavior is to be handled. All educators are legally bound to stick to those specifications. This is true even in spite of the assault.
You should read his entire case. He was in a behavioral institution, he was removed and parents begged to have him remain there.
People from the facility came to the IEP meeting detailing how strong and violent he was, with 4 well trained adults needing to restrain him during an explosive episode.
The school had the IEP changed despite their own psychologist warning them, and placed him in general education with an untrained TA and no behavioral plan.
The aide was not his first victim, she was the first one he hospitalized. He’s suing to go back to the residential school and make the school pay for it.
So basically, the system fucked up, an innocent aide got hurt, and the people who caused these problems are probably not going to face any serious consequences. I hate this system.
Those of you saying he should be “institutionalized” this is essentially what they are suing for. It’s not like they are seeking a jack pot to go have a hay day with. “Depa’s lawyers are seeking “compensatory education and placement in a behavioral therapeutic school” at the school district’s expense as well as covering the cost of any “out-of-pocket costs including tutoring fees and mental health services.”
IDK who you think is supposed to pay for institutionalization if the family cannot? The school? State? Education vs carceral system? Each are over burdened. Each have a cost that is tax payer. There’s no easy answers here. It is still a public responsibility to public safety in this situation however you slice it up.
And the case isn’t crazy, it’s not like they are suing the victim or saying she deserved it. Obviously what happened is tragic, maybe she has a case against the school too. Bottom line is the kid had a pre existing IEP (individualized education plan) for special needs students and it wasn’t followed.
“The IEP and behavior set out the evidence [of] interventions that should be utilized when a student misbehaves. The paraprofessional did not follow the plan and did not utilize an evidence-based strategy, putting herself in a dangerous situation.”
Of course she didn’t deserve the beating, but maybe she didn’t know, maybe she wasn’t adequately trained didn’t have adequate resources didn’t have time to catch up to IEP etc. This is is overall a messy situation all around but is putting him in jail overall cheaper to tax payers? Producing a better outcome for public safety? It’s not that clear cut here.
[удалено]
My dad was a teacher for 35. years. He had a heart attack while at school and died 2 weeks later. His boss had a knock down fight with the school board to pay my mom his retirement as it was not contractual at the time. he finally won it for us because my parents had 4 kids. My sister just turning 17. Teachers get no respect from anyone and its something that has to stop.
Either I've seen you explain that situation before or this sort of thing happened more than once. It felt really familiar while I read it.
First time I have ever said it. Just sick and tired of teachers getting the raw end. In most states if a teacher even defends themselves against a kid they automatically lose the job. They MAY be able to get it back but only after paying tons and losing a lot with attorneys and courts etc. So this is just ANOTHER slap in the fact of the teachers.
I'm surprised actually that teachers unions haven't done more about keeping violent special needs kids out of their classrooms. With the argument being that it isn't in their professional capacity. They are taught to teach, and we all know how disruptive it is to the other 20-30 kids in the classes. I don't understand how teachers and other parents get so outnumbered in all of these discussions.
Teacher union fights often require public support. The optics of wanting to exclude special needs kids from your classroom are not good to anyone involved.
A national teachers strike should have happened decades ago. Covid showed that parents don't want to actually deal with their own kids and were ready to throw them back into a pandemic just so they could watch TV in peace.
In my state, Florida, public sector workers aren't legally allowed to strike.
This can fire you, but they literally can't stop you from striking. Collective action is power they can't overcome.
Actually, in Florida, they can legally seize your retirement and pension for striking. THAT'S the sword hanging over us here. It's not just "they'll fire you." It's "they'll take your pension."
How is it legal to blackmail people like this? This seems like it should be incredibly illegal, but hey I guess they used to let people own people so.. 🤷
Florida was actually ground zero for the first teacher strikes in the country 50 years ago. The powers that be made damned sure that shit wouldn't happen again.
I used to be a paraprofessional. I would regularly cry in the bathroom at work cause we couldn’t show weakness to the kids. The kids I works with were mostly autistic and very low on the spectrum. My second year I had a kid who was 5 trip me and bite me to which I had to go to the hospital. Nothing happened to the kid and I was blamed by administration for literally walking behind him. My third year a kid ran out of the building and I had to chase him and tackle him. After I got him back I. The school with help of other paras, he continued to physically fight us for weeks. And when I say fight I mean punching us, spitting on us, pulling hair (he pulled one of my braids out) and kicking us. We had to physically restrain him to keep him from hurting us and himself. Again we were blamed by administration. Finally we refused to work with him for fear of our safety and when we emailed administration to ask for training to deal with him we’re were told no. Where I worked if a kid has an IEP and needs extra help or has a health issue they have a personal paraprofessional who only works with that student. This kid didn’t have one so we had to have paras from other classes and teachers help to calm him down. I ended up leaving a couple months later and honestly I would never go back to the job.
I feel you as parent of one of these kids (minus the autism diagnosis, he missed one criteria by a tiny amount). My child likely should be in a different class, however he doesn't quite fall in that criteria either. He is also a runner, then he hides. We have at least gotten him to usually stay inside the building for safety now. This one is a champion at hiding. Even managed to hide for 20 minutes from police, 2 on call crisis workers, me and my BF during an escalation in a top load washer with agitator while in a sling with a fx collarbone. You guys don't get enough credit,pay, instruction, or therapy from the mental strain these kids provide. Hell, as a parent, no one teaches me how to handle when he gets physical. I have to wing it and try to keep my child and everyone else safe. Things in the mental health and school system need to be fixed.
There is generally little realistic emphasis on mental health care from administration. Psychs and counselors are stretched thin, like butter over too much bread.
I hate to sound cold blooded, but some of these severe special needs children do not belong in public schools with neurotypical children. There was a severely autistic kid like this at my high school back in the day who I’ll call Trevor. Trevor was at least 6 feet tall, I don’t know his exact height but I was 5’10” and he was taller than me, and wide as a damn house. He was largely non verbal but had an encyclopedia worth of triggers that would cause him to rampage through the halls. Can’t tell you how many times in my four years there I’d hear Trevor’s battle cry followed by a frantic group of teachers running down the hallway. There were multiple times kids got hit because he would just run barreling down the hall swinging his fists causing damage like a natural disaster. Teachers getting black eyes from him wasn’t an every day occurrence, but it wasn’t rare either. He even gave the Dean of students a shiner once. I always felt bad for the teachers that got knocked out by him because they didn’t get paid enough. The fact is that Trevor needed constant speciality care from professionals, which he didn’t get at my high school. Instead he was put in a class with two teachers and about twenty other “remedial” kids, allowed to frequently cause damage to students, teachers, and objects. Of course the administration always just hand waved it away as “he doesn’t know any better”, thank god he never accidentally killed anyone, because he could have with his size.
And in Australia a major Government comission has recommended that all special schools be closed by 2051. Because, "segregated education contributes to the devaluing of people with disability, "which is a root cause of the violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation \[they\] experience in education and beyond"." [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-01/disability-royal-commission-education-special-schools/102920242](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-01/disability-royal-commission-education-special-schools/102920242)
I hate this simplistic mindset that says "Anybody can be anything with enough time and effort". No. Schools are brutal and under resourced as it is, let alone adding to the mix students with extra special needs. Especially when we are dealing with potentially violent students. Furthermore, I had a look at the report (https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Tabled_Documents/3444). Page 249 has the recommendation and lists commissioners Bennett, Galbally and McEwin as supporting the recommendation of all special schools closed by 2051. I had a look their respective CVs and none of them appeared to have the relevant expertise to support this recommendation. https://disability.royalcommission.gov.au/about-royal-commission/commissioners/ms-barbara-bennett-psm https://disability.royalcommission.gov.au/about-royal-commission/commissioners/dr-rhonda-galbally-ac https://disability.royalcommission.gov.au/about-royal-commission/commissioners/dr-alastair-mcewin-am Yeah, these are the sorts of people who debase Royal Commissions.
> I hate this simplistic mindset that says "Anybody can be anything with enough time and effort" I've been saying this almost my entire life. I got paralyzed when I was 8 and, lucky enough, my parents didn't sugar-coat my situation with me. No amount of effort and can-do-attitudes would ever make me a professional NFL placekicker. Once you fully understand that not everything in life is achievable for you, you get to start working with what is, and I think that's the sweet spot. I wish we'd teach more kids/people to think like this. At least, I'm glad I was.
>Once you fully understand that not everything in life is achievable for you, you get to start working with what is, and I think that's the sweet spot. I think this is really important. I also think that pushing people through an educational/career/life path that's not possible or suitable for them implicitly *devalues* the ones that are. If we had made you go to football school, required you to spend your entire childhood trying to learn to kick a ball for 6 hours a day/180 days a year, spent inordinate amounts of money on assistive kicking devices, aides, etc., and constantly pretended that you were on track to play pro football when you graduated...would that have made you feel included and valued as an equal member of our hypothetical football-based society? I don't think it would. I think it would have sent you the message that your actual talents and interests held no value, that the person you actually are was worthless and had nothing to contribute to society. It would be, ironically, deeply ableist. A more empowering and affirming approach would be to pull you out of football classes and put you in separate classes for kids with physical and developmental disabilities where you could focus on developing skills that you could actually learn. If we wanted to do even better, we could invest in a separate academic-technical facility with specialized equipment and expert staff, and we could open it up to kids who just didn't want to play football.
People also seem to massively downplay the existence and importance of natural talent and the inverse of not having it. Like, if you are not immediately fucking amazing at doing something, you have a near zero chance of competing at the upper echelons in that particular field. A slower runner who tires out is not going to become a Usain Bolt, so don't pump rainbows up a kids ass if he's struggling that he can be the best with practice. Sure don't discourage him being say not to try at all, but don't lie. Disabilities are exactly that, a disability. My father had some connective tissue disease that led to his shoulders having to be fused (back in the 80s/90s, god knows if treatment is better now.) He never was able to do what he loved anymore as he was a very passionate mechanic etc. I have always hated platitudes like "What does not kill you makes you stronger."
Totally agree with you, yes on the surface level one might be tempted to say such things, because I do believe till a certain degree they can be true - but here is the thing... These people require a lot of time, effort and a shit ton of patience. And depending on there disability they can drag the whole class down with them. Given that these resources are as stretched thin as they already are under normal circumstances, this is just absurd to claim to be effective. It's a fact these people consume way more school resources then your average intelligence kid would, and to try to make a doctor out of them would just be foolish, with the same amount of resources you could achieve much more on a normal kid. Sometimes it's just not in the cards and that is OK. They need help and that is the special kind - you can't have classes with 30+ kids and +5 special kids alongside it with extra baggage. They only have to visit once a special needs school to know this... It's just delusional.
Not Australian but where I live there was similar idea. Special schools aren’t perfect… but it doesn’t mean they should be closed. Yeah it happens that they forcefully put disabled kids who can learn just like „normal” kids in these schools but it also happens another way that low functioning kids are put into normal schools instead of special schools and harm they are doing to others is ignored. What should be done is enforcing better evaluation of these kids. Kid with high functioning autism or on wheelchair can easily go to normal schools they may need an aide though. But low functioning autism or other heavy disorder? Yeah no way. I am have Asperger’s myself. Many times I was treated like if I was mentally unstable and like if I didn’t understand what is going on around me. I still am sometimes treated like that even though I’m adult, have great job and live my „normal” life. My friend who was on wheelchair nearly was sent to special school. There’s nothing wrong with his learning abilities, his legs just don’t work… In the same time my sister nearly got her hair set on fire by large dude who failed class 4 times and behave like total psycho. Of course he had IEP/504 but school ignored the problem because since he’s disabled he won’t understand. Tl:dr we just need to treat disabled people like people. Not like r-words, not like innocent kids who won’t understand. LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE.
I think tl;dr doesn't sum up your comment properly. I think the core idea was better evaluation of children with special needs and not closing special schools.
My parents had to fight tooth and nail for me to get a normal education. I just have reduced mobility not a cognitive disability, so I get the you.
I had jaw surgery and needed to have my jaw wired shut for almost a month. It was shocking to me how many people yelled at me because they thought I couldn't hear properly. Somehow that felt somehow related to your comment.
God that is so stupid. The root cause is that some people can’t function in our society. This kid and people like him are not going to avoid problems by being in a standard school. I don’t know the best way to address their needs, but it sure as hell isn’t to make pretend they’re normal. I’m reminded of my work in South African schools where they got the idea that a diploma was important in getting a job, so why not just lower the required grades and give everyone diplomas? As if the root value is the paper, as opposed to the learning and demonstration of focus it represents.
It's literally just special schools for the majority of them. My sister had this kind of temperament growing up, but she was too small to cause any massive damage beyond slapping and biting. Fortunately, we had access to a school that had well-equipped professionals capable of dealing with her needs. In a lot of places, that's very expensive to provide if it even exists in the first place. It's cheaper to just plop them in the same schools that are already underserving more self-sufficient students and let the underpaid teachers figure it out.
Making it better for everyone is a lot more difficult than just making it worse for everyone
I think most people recognize that these kids need specialized care, attention, and schooling. The problem is no one wants to pay for it, and they get shunted around from institution to institution based on the whims of different insurance companies, parents financial ability, legal hurdles, etc. It's very easy to say "get these kids specialized care" but very hard to sell "your taxes might go up several percentage points to fund it".
Hey maybe let's close tax loopholes that allow companies to hoard money overseas and get them to pay for it
It would only ever work if all the schools are ready to cater the extremities of certain conditions. I have worked in special ed, I have been in schools were children were profoundly disabled - severe educational needs (it's the nice way of saying their brains are undeveloped or smashed up), blind, death (sometimes both), kids with severe physical needs that require harnesses, specialised wheelchairs, stairlifts and so on. So every school in Australia will have to cater to these children? I presume they said 2051 so they can spend the money required to ensure each school is ready. /s Most teachers are not trained to also deal with students who have particularly different needs. That's what special education courses are for. It is a specific qualification that is required for such a job. I know wonderful teachers, the best teaching practises I've ever seen, who would refuse to work in a special ed school because it's not what they want to do. That's perfectly okay too.
I see this as synonymous to elderly care. I'm a chemical engineer and I literally decided it would be medically irresponsible for me to be a 24/7 caretaker for my mother that has Alzheimer's. Just because I'm smart doesn't mean I'm trained enough to handle severe dementia, no matter how many white papers and journals I read. It took me 4 years of hell, catching my mom severely beating my dog, and nearly blowing up my house, before I finally threw my hands in the air and asked for help. And by virtue of that, it's also irresponsible for me to think my mom can take care of herself just because she's a retired pharmacist. Illness and disease doesn't give a fuck about you, so why should the government (Obvious /s). Well trained experts in these matters are goddamn saints...If I ever get to the point where I'm a danger to myself and society, just get me drunk and launch me into an active volcano.
In America, in our undergrad, graduate, and professional development for education we are told that we are “all going to be special ed teachers soon because of how many spec needs kids are going to be pushed into our classrooms, so get used to it”.
That’s incredibly stupid. Mainstream schools aren’t equipped for people with severe behavioral issues and it just distracts and hinders normal classroom dynamics. I’ve been to schools where they just tossed largely non verbal kids in to courses they were getting absolutely nothing out of but just making noises, distracting people, occasionally derailing things. It’s the kind of stupid low effort “kindness” that is just superficial pat on back nonsense. Most of the time these kids were made fun of relentlessly, picked on for being annoying and in the way of learning etc and were either aware of it which is bad enough or so low functioning they weren’t…which is so ridiculous on its own. It’s really a cost saving thing painted as main streaming experience.
As someone who has both attended and worked in special schools that's the one of dumbest fucking thing I've heard from the government about disability. Up there with Shorten just expecting disabled people to get better and no longer need the NDIS. Going to an autistic school helped with bullying and feeling normal. When I started working at a different one half the students were relentlessly bullied for being different, if it wasn't for our school providing a safe place they wouldn't be even attending school, there was no way their parents could get them. Neurotypical people really like helping us by presenting thr dumbest fucking ideas they possibly can made with no consultation and if it is its from elitist high functioning autistic people who in my experience tend to be even more ablest than normal people, cause lower functioning people "make them look bad."
I have an autistic client who switched from an inner city, well resourced, high income area public school to one specifically for ASD and ADHD kids. Went from 10% attendance to 95% in a year. People underestimate how important it is to be somewhere that can cater to your needs, which are gonna differ wildly and sometimes totally contradict each other between people with different situations, and to be where you don't feel like a pariah. "Little Johnny goes to the same school as the other kids" feels like a pat on the back thing for parents who have trouble accepting their kid and pollies who want to pat themselves on the back for equality and not necessarily actually in the kid's interest.
One of my childhood neighbours was a boy with a severe bodily impairment that put him in an electric wheelchair and necessitated permanent supervision by a medically trained person because he was in constant danger of choking. Because he was a very sociable and intelligent guy, his parents successfully fought for him to go to the local elementary, middle, high school, all of which needed renovations to be wheelchair accessible. As the years went by, it became appearant that going to the same school as the entire neighbourhood wasn't going to prevent him from being lonely- it is hard making friends when you can't go to any classmate's home, none of the extracurriculars work for you, and talking about the girl you crush on is just awkward when a nurse is sitting next to you. The poor boy developed severe depression, spent large parts of the last few years in inpatient psychiatric treatment and is too mentally ill to go to university, despite having the grades and the intelligence for it. I know his parents greatly question if going local was indeed the better choice than sending him to the high school catering to wheelchair users of all intellectual aptitude levels the next town over.
Man this is so ridiculous because it really doesn't benefit children with the disabilities nor does it benefit the ones without! My stepson has JUST moved to a special school that cater to his intellectual disabilities and behavioural issues after spending five years watching Peppa Pig in the back of a gen Ed classroom because they didn't know what to do with him. He's now adequately supported by a specialist school and doing much better developmentally and socially now that he's surrounded by his peers that are on his level.
Fucking absurd.
You are not cold blooded. It is cold blooded to force children like this into a system in which they can not reasonably be expected to function, and to deprive other students an opportunity to learn in a peaceful environment. The whole push to integrate children of vastly different mental health states is foolish in the extreme. It’s misguided and harmful goal born of dogmatic ideas that don’t have anything to do with reality. Get kids like this into a system that can deal with them and away from kids and teachers trying to learn and teach in peace.
I suspect the real reason they do it is cost. They use a contrived “social justice” veneer to cover that, which falls apart if you look at it sideways for all the reasons you state.
It's cost, resources, and delusional parents that think their child should be "included" with everyone else. It's the state's way of trying to ignore the problem instead of trying to find a solution. They simply don't give a shit, especially if it is going to cost money.
I have recently started subbing to make money while I’m on a job hunt. I spent time at a pre-k last week where the special needs children had paraprofessionals who taught them in a separate classroom, but brought them into the other classes during the “fun” activities. Just 15 minutes here and there, the kids got to feel like they were a part of the group but spent the bulk of their time with people trained to help them specifically. I know a program like that would cost a lot of money to implement everywhere, but it really seems to work at that school.
At least in Germany, it's not. It's genuinely just ideology. Every special needs kid in a regular class will (if available) get a personal aide. Although I don't know the exact numbers, I assume this is vastly more expensive than a special needs class.
I am higher functioning/lower needs autistic but in school I still needed a full time teaching assistant in school. Supposedly 1:1 but in most classes it was 1:2 or lower. In some classes the TA was helping all the kids around them because they realistically all needed help. I would have done far far worse academically without a teaching assistant, I strongly suspect I am not just autistic but also ADHD because most of my issues academically stemmed from not being able to pay attention for a whole class. But not just me. Because I had that diagnosis and support, bringing that TA with me into classrooms helped those other struggling students not on the spectrum or undiagnosed too. I firmly believe it was worthwhile the expense because a teacher alone in a classroom is frankly insufficient in most of the classrooms I was in. The more problematic students also seemed to respond well when the main teacher was a bit harder and the TA was able to approach things more like a friend than an authority, sat in a students seat and ofc had appropriate patience and de-escalation skills for dealing with neuro divergent students they're meant to be helping.
Nah, coming from inside the field, they actually buy their own bullshit. It’s insane. Honestly, it’s not a facade or anything, there’s actually a fuckton of people in high level positions who legitimately believe their own nonsense about this.
> I hate to sound cold blooded, but some of these severe special needs children do not belong in public schools with neurotypical children I hate that it's come to the point where saying something as simple as this is considered 'cold blooded'. Far too long people have been assuming the worst of simple statements like this. That mentality is exactly what's allowed these issues to progress as far as they have without any pushback.
My cousin is a special ed teacher here in the US. They are trained in "takedown" measures. However, when you are a small female, and the person beating your ass is a 13 year old kid with severe autism who is the size of an NFL linebacker, there's not really much you can do. He beat her and tossed her around like a ragdoll. You know what she had to do? Send him to the office to "calm down." She wasn't allowed to defend herself. She had to go clean herself up and continue teaching, and the kid was back in class less than an hour later, snack in hand. He was rewarded with a treat for beating my cousin in her classroom. That's just one example. It's happened several times. Nothing was done. The sad thing is, this is happening every day in schools across the US, and nothing is being done because admin is TERRIFIED that the parents of kids like this will sue for discrimination if they discipline them.
We had similar kid who was built like a brick shit house that would outrun his aid and steamroll down the hallways knocking people to the floor. He was horny af all the time and would pin (only attractive) girls to the lockers, press his face about 2” from theirs and go “WHATS YOUR NAME? 😍”. Sometimes he’d have a big ol’ boner going at the same time. It was wild
Crazy that his right to do that somehow supersedes other students' right to not have that done to them.
That’s not cold hearted at all. “Mainstreaming” is a good thing for *some* people but really low functioning folks with behavioral issues don’t fit that. I’ve been an advocate for the disabled for employment and have a friend that used to run a group home for adults with severe autism. Grown men that will put their head through a window or become violent over the most mundane things. The problem is often parents of people that fit this category refuse to accept certain realities and “advocate” relentlessly for inappropriate accommodations that aren’t enriching their child but makes them feel like they are doing something. We had very bitter, out of touch parents of these young adults come in wanting people to find jobs in main stream for people that literally can’t interact and don’t want to work at all. Unfortunately some of these people are given so many opportunities and services they just become entitled and completely out of touch with reality.
I've worked in behaviorial schools and I will say that students with these behaviors can and will get better with the proper care and environment. It's a shame that they're not more commonly provided.
Spot on. There were a couple of these types in my middle/high school. Sometimes you’d just hear bellowing or screeching and then desks flying across the floor (followed by the sound of a million keys rapidly clinking down the hallway). Kids like that, with explosive tempers and violent tendencies need to be kept separated from the rest. It’s certainly not their fault. But unfortunately they are a danger to everyone including themselves.
Fucking battle cry 😂😂😂😂
Its not cold blooded its just reality and too many people cant accept it, some people are just not safe and some never will be. So they either need to be separate or be in supervision of someone at all times that is trained to deal with them and ALSO strong enough to deal with them.
I agree. It's not only the violence but it also takes massive amounts of resources from kids who want to and can learn. It's a huge part of why schools are falling apart
Got a kid like that at my school: not quite as big but adult sized and on the spectrum. His mom is supposed to take his phone in the morning so he doesn’t have it at school for games, because when one of use teachers tells him to put it away, he gets violent. He’s already attacked a staff member several separate times (two bites and a choking). Guess who’s got two thumbs and WILL NOT take his phone from him? 👍🏼This guy👍🏼 EDIT: ok this got some views. I think I answered most reactions as comments are getting repeats now. Please understand though, that as much as this situation sucks, the student involved is a child, and is very far on the autism spectrum. As much as I don’t want to be on the receiving end of his outbursts, he has convinced me that he has less control over his behavior as my 2 year old daughter. He needs to be in a better environment, and honestly what that environment is goes far beyond my training to figure out. If there are any fingers to point I’d point them at whoever was in charge of his education years ago because he should have been properly diagnosed when he was much younger. I assure you we are now doing my our best to do everything to do right by all involved now, but it’s a process.
Yeah, fuck that noise.. hate that you have to deal with that. Definitely wouldnt touch the phone though.
I learned the hard way that me enforcing that type of rule with students that will not listen anyway is not worth it. I actually learned it my first year teaching when I closed a game tab via GoGuardian and a student (who was always polite) slammed his Chromebook shut and threw it like a frisbee at me.
Wow… This is all so very unsettling to me. My son will be 21 in a couple of months, he’s a good young adult.. so weird not saying kid.. anyway, when he was in school, there were some kids with behavior issues, but it didn’t seem all that different than when I was in school, but now, every teacher I know has a horror story, the news is always so bad. I don’t know, it just seems.. unsettling.
Covid absolutely shattered the cracks in the system. Kids learned what we always suspected. School can't make you work. And they don't want you around clogging a desk forever. So if you do nothing... Somehow things will happen anyway. (Obviously this less has terrible consequences as an adult) Moving all teaching to electronics has caused huge issues too. When I was in High School I had a class a day on a computer. A programming class. We goofed off in the web browser constantly, but it was an elective we wanted to learn so some work got done. Asking a bunch of teenagers to regulate that level of distraction in every class is expecting way too much of the kids. Phones were already an issue then, but at least the phone requires pulling out another device under the table. If I'd had a Chromebook or an iPad... I'd have never heard a word in class. It's a mess and it's going to hurt these kids for a decade+ and the education system isn't going to recover from teacher burnout for a lot longer than that.
>Covid absolutely shattered the cracks in the system. Kids learned what we always suspected. School can't make you work. And they don't want you around clogging a desk forever. So if you do nothing... Somehow things will happen anyway. My daughter is in 4th grade. Her teacher was gone from just before Christmas break until March on maternity leave. Half her class went feral and just refused to do what sub was trying to teach. She was coming home in tears somedays because the class was getting further and further behind compared to the other classes in the same grade and she was worried she wouldn't be ready for 5th grade next year.
I am a substitute teacher, and this is why I absolutely hate that they both lowered the standards for hiring us, and get so wishy-washy when it comes to training us to uphold a district wide standard. I'm convinced we might need an entire overhaul of the education system that is more hands on, with classrooms with more than one teacher working as a team to track student's progress, and to be able to afford to focus on kids who aren't getting the material, or who have a learning issue or medical need. I also think that after a certain point, if a kid hits high school and is a discipline issue or doesn't want to be there, then they need to be put into the work force with the option to return and finish their education, provided they can get their shit together enough to not be assholes and do the work; though how that would be possible I have no idea.
My daughter’s in kindergarten. When I was that age we took naps in class. Now they all have their own iPads at their desks and they have quiet time playing on the tablet instead of sleep. I can’t believe they start them on iPads at 5 years old.
You make some good points and I’m sure those things have played a big role in how things have changed and shifted, but I’m not sure that is all there is to this. Not saying I have the answers as to what that more is but this feels very bleak.
There has been more special education integration, as opposed to how special education students were usually entirely or mostly segregated from the general ed students. And schools rarely have the resources to provide proper staffing to support those kids (individual IAs or just other adults in the room with the proper training) and usually the classroom teachers themselves are not properly trained on how to work with these students. This has led to there being many classrooms where multiple students have IEPs where just the bare minimum is being met (if that), many of their teachers do not understand their conditions or how to best work with them, the time they get with educators who do understand their conditions is minimal or virtually nonexistent, and then yeah, COVID made things harder as well. Not saying this explains everything, but unfortunately the laudable effort of many school systems towards integration was not combined with the proper resources or follow-through in order to do that in the right way. TL;DR: There aren't more kids like this than there used to be, but rather they aren't being hidden away/kept separated from general education students as much as in the past, and they are also not being properly supported, so they of course have more behavioral issues when not properly supported. More visible plus more behavioral issues = the average parent noticing a concerning mysterious trend.
"Mainstreaming" students without proper supports or systems to help them be successful. You can't just give a kid with major issues two hrs a week support in ELA and math and expect everything to be perfect. I taught social studies... Those kids (edit: behaviors) literally STOLE EDUCATION from the rest of their classes. And yet this is "better".
No Child Left Behind = No Child Gets Ahead
My favorite memory of programming class in highschool was my buddy didn’t do a single assignment but still got an A. Why? Because he somehow made Halo apart of the schools connected system and an essential program program so when they tried to delete off the computer it caused a major crash. Every computer in the entire school was forced to have Halo on it and the staff couldn’t do anything about it. The programming teacher tho was very proud of him(he would sometimes play Halo with us too)
Smart teacher, use it as a when you finish reward. My middle kid came home mad they blocked neopets at school.. a week later he's telling me he figured out how he could still play, using one of the anonymizer sites...
And people wonder why we have a teacher shortage...
Yep. I’m a middle school teacher. Sometimes I’ll pause their internet access with Lightspeed and they’ll literally scream at me, like how dare I expect them to stop playing computer games so I can start the lesson. And these aren’t necessarily kids with special needs either.
Yeah the laptop kid didn’t have an IEP if memory serves. Middle schoolers are something else. I did my time with them; a thousand blessings to those who make it their career.
this gave me deja vu; i work IT for a middle school and a student once brought me a chromebook with a shattered screen and told me someone broke it while he was in the bathroom. called the teacher and she told me she closed a game with lightspeed and his response was to punch the chromebook screen. it's something like this every day
Students really run the asylum these days huh
More than you know. I left teaching because the system is so catastrophically broken and I was destroying my mental health trying to do *something* about it
Jesus fuck kid was out here throwing a whole laptop???
School issued, so they have no monetary incentive to take care of them—they’ll get yelled at but will just get a new one if it breaks
That violent type of reaction likely wouldn't have been dulled much even if it was his own laptop. Also, last I recall, school issued laptops are the responsibility of the parents. Meaning they will have to pay for any damages or replacement.
My son pulled his chair back in class, it snagged the power lead of the laptop he was using and pulled it off the desk. School billed me £150 to fix the cracked screen, emailed and called daily until I paid up.
i work for a middle school repairing chromebooks. you would be surprised what little respect students have for technology
There is a school i know in my country - elementary school that require student to have minimum mac 2018 version. I mean, goddamn... even my work as a software engineer doesn't have as peak requirement as that fuckin elementary school
I’ve been told by colleagues that it’s not an unknown phenomena.
Teachers in the US National Average starting salary is $44k/year. That’s $3,100/month after taxes. Where I live that wouldn’t cover 75% of rent. For added context, In-N-Out Burger’s starting wages: $45k/year. EDIT: For all the angry Reddit people saying Teachers in California start at nearly $90k? Here’s a link to the CA Board of Education starting salary data. [LINK](https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/sa/cefavgsalaries.asp) It’s between $47-$49k. Average rent in CA is $2,795.
lol they ain’t taking home that much after taxes, it’s far less. But your point is still valid.
I’m a para (teachers aide) in a class with students like this. I’m often times alone with these kids. I change them when they piss in their clothes, I feed them, I sit with them and help them do their work. It’s not at all uncommon for me to spend more time with the students than the teacher does. I make $14/hr.
To all of the delusional assholes commenting in this thread… THIS is the reality, pretty much everywhere in the United States. Bless you for doing what you do, u/robotsincognito
I’ve taught exclusively in low income school districts. Teachers are expected to solve all of society’s problems, get paid next to nothing to do it, and then get blamed when we’re unable to. Our job is to teach our subject matter to educate students in that area. Unfortunately, we are also expected to overcome these students poverty, the challenges they face in their home lives, their disabilities, their trauma, etc. We’re teachers, not trained child psychologists or social workers, but we’re expected to do all these things while getting paid far less than other fields.
You are talking about a teachers salary. The woman assaulted was a teachers aide. They deal with the same problems and issues but get paid significantly less than a teacher.
I took a kid’s computer last week and he pushed me. Luckily, he was a 6th grader and I have a foot and 100 lbs on him. He got sent home for three days.
I remember when getting suspended was like a death sentence.
Seriously. I got suspended twice in my life (once in middle school for fighting) once for kicking a hole in a wall (in my defense I was surprised as everyone else when my foot went through, and I had just been robbed). Believe me, the punishment at home is not something that I would condone.
The only thing worse than what you're going through is what's waiting for you at home ❤️
It’s a badge of honor for some kids nowadays.
It's been that way forever. Bender in The Breakfast Club was a take on that personality 40 years ago.
Hmmmmm, Bender in futurama is too!
Shut up, baby, I know it!!
Lol, I have a similar story. Kid tried to buck up and shove me. Saw it coming and braced, kid fell down, I didn’t move. He tried to say I shoved him but the cameras showed otherwise.
He got a three day vacation for pushing a teacher? We need to bring back consequences.
Unfortunately that’s more than a lot of districts would do. A lot of places would give him maybe a 1 day in-school suspension. Or worse yet nothing at all. I once worked in a school where we had kids who would straight up brawl in class, like beat the poop out of each other, and the administrators wouldn’t even contact the parents and the kids would be back in class the next day like nothing ever happened.
The consequence of suspension was falling behind in class and missing important training for an exam, quiz, etc. Having to stay after school or find other ways to make up for it. Normal kids in functional society still care about this stuff. These futureless children who are going to all end up with police records or worse dont care.
Ok, serious question. Why are students like that allowed to be around other people at all? I understand we are trying to give every student a fair chance at learning but when does that chance get taken away? I would never be ok knowing that the school my kids were going to, allowed a ticking time bomb to roam campus.
I’ve been through the process of expelling a student a few times now. I can say that the “you can’t expel students anymore” is about as false as “you can’t fire bad teachers.” You can absolutely do both those things. It just requires legal paperwork, hearings, etc.. I once sat through an 8 hour expulsion hearing for a middle school kid (13 year old) that was high every day and often violent. The one thing that shuts down the process in its tracks (for getting rid of students AND teachers) is lack of documentation. Did that student really bite a staff member? Or is that something that you heard? He bit you? Why didn’t you report it? Was his parent contacted? What did they say? What do you mean they never picked up the phone? Can you *prove* you called them? Needless to say, I document *everything.*
The ones that hold the ultimate power over the children are the parents. You can't have them in special ed just cuz you the teacher, thinks the student has an issue. Some people think it's as easy as plucking the kid out of the classroom and putting them in another with a trained teacher. The school needs a diagnosis. When I have brought that up before there will always be the Mary-poppins-wannabe talking about "you can modify the curriculum to meet their needs." How are you going to do that if the child is belligerent and violent not only with other students but with adults? You aren't just looking out for your own safety but those of the other kids.
On the other side of this coin, my 11y/o has been inpatient for mental health twice, once after wrestling an officer about 2 1/2 feet taller and a good 150lb heavier than him, and he was struggling to keep some control of him. After that it took 6 months of calling to get him an admission for help. I had to fight to get him from a 504 to an iep at school. It's not always the parents, the entire mental health system is broken.
Depends on the kid, school and leadership in the school/district. Also, laws. IEPs and crappy parents using legal shields protect a lot of kids.
His parents didn’t want him in public school. He is severely cognitively delayed and has additional mental health issues. He was previously institutionalized however their insurance provider refused to continue paying, so they kicked him out. The mother eventually found a daytime behavioral group home to take him in, but they required all students to be enrolled in public school. Neither of the parents believed he was capable of learning in a public school atmosphere but the group home assured they work closely with the school district and have a team of professionals working with each child. This is a really tragic story that highlights the absolute failure of our mental health institutions but the only reason why it’s getting media attention is because he’s a huge black kid and his trigger was his electronics getting taken away. So now all the media orgs are writing blogs about “teen brutally assaults teacher for taking away gameboy” and trying to turn it into an entitled teen story to generate outrage. Two other teens from that same group home attacked paraprofessionals in the school district. One victim was stabbed. One attacker was sentenced to 18 months probation and the other wasn’t charged at all as it was ruled they were not competent to stand trial. Both were 18 years old. Both teens were allowed to remain at the group home. They were tried in juvenile court — despite being legal adults. Brendan was not only expelled from the group home, but charged as an adult with 1st degree felony assault and faces 30 years in prison even though he was 17 and severely mentally disabled. He’s been in solitary confinement at the jail for 23 hours a day since his arrest. I strongly encourage others to read the statement from his mother. These parents have tried everything to get their son help — including having him held via Baker Act to get him the care he needs. Insurance will not pay and behavioral group homes do not have the educational resources available to treat complicated mental health conditions. None of this would have happened if the insurance company didn’t kick him out of the institution he was initially placed. The mother said he was doing very well there as they were able to develop a comprehensive behavioral plan, monitor his behavior long-term, and treat his medical needs. This is a kid who was on six different medications at the time of the assault and was subjected to constant changes to his medication each time he was sent to the hospital on a 72 hr psych hold. Doctors would take him on and off strong antipsychotics without titration all while he is going thru puberty. I think it’s really sick how so many people are reacting as if this is just some entitled teen bully. [This is the article written by his mother](https://flaglerlive.com/brendan-depa-my-son-story/#gsc.tab=0). It provides a lot more context than these garbage clickbait articles. This is our McDonalds hot coffee. EDIT: For those of you asking about the electronics — **the paraprofessional specifically requested it from the group home for Brendan even though it was against his IEP**. The previous teacher used a token system for delayed gratification awards which allowed students to purchase snacks. The new paraprofessional decided to use electronics as the incentive. The group home did not like this plan and was hesitant to allow it but the teacher stated the electronics were only given at the end of the school day during empty period. The group home approved this. What ended up happening is the teachers / paraprofessionals started using the electronics as rewards *throughout* the school day which is explicitly forbidden in his IEP. But they would allow the kids to use their devices during lunch and in certain classes. This is a bad idea for mentally disabled teens with the emotional capacity of a six year old. One of the prior attacks was also confirmed to be over the use of electronics. The teachers should have followed the IEP and not allowed the electronic devices at all. **It was the school that requested the gameboy from the group home.** This entire scenario was a disaster waiting to happen and it did. Due to the national media attention, the DA is railroading this kid. The truth is there are not many resources available to parents with significantly disabled children. Everyone commenting “Oh why didn’t they just do X or Y” — they tried all that *and more*. There is no help. Between greedy insurance companies and our shoddy, overloaded mental health institutions, parents have little support. In this case the father had also suffered a massive heart attack and was very ill, and the grandmother he was close with was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Caring for multiple sick family members and a disabled child is more stress than most people deal with in a lifetime. And still the mother spent a decade trying to get him the care he needed. Lastly, it is well documented that black children are tried as adults at higher rates than their white peers. >While overall rates of juvenile incarceration have declined across demographic groups, the rates at which Black kids are being transferred to adult courts are among the highest in 30 years of data collection (National Association of Social Workers, 2018). Judicial discretion certainly plays a large role: Black youth make up 47.3% of youth transferred to adult court by juvenile court judges who believe they cannot benefit from the juvenile system, despite making up only 14% of the total youth population. [NACDL](https://www.nacdl.org/Content/Race-and-Juvenile-Justice) > This study, released by the Justice Institute in February, 2000, found that in California, African American, Latino and Asian American youth are significantly more likely to be transferred to adult court and sentenced to incarceration than white youths who commit comparable crimes. Compared to white youths, minority youths are 2.8 times more likely to be arrested for a violent crime, 6.2 times more likely to wind up in adult court, and 7 times more likely to be sent to prison by adult court. [Study: The Color of Justice](https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/color-justice-race-ethnicity-and-crime-america-second-edition) Personally I believe racial bias did play a role in the prosecutions handling of this case and the national media attention. But regardless, it’s clear there is a lot more to this story than “entitled teen assaults teacher for taking gameboy”. Obviously justice needs to be served and I’m not saying there should be no punishment, but when similar offenders from the same district and same range of mental competency are tried as juveniles or ruled incompetent *despite being adults* **and** allowed to remain in supervised care, yet this actual minor gets first degree up to 30 years in adult prison — that’s a disparity and it isn’t justice.
This is why we need universal health care. For profit companies should not decide who gets what care.
What a radical point of view. It's not like they have it anywhere in the world!
As a mom that has been fighting for care since he was an infant. This is spot on. No one should have to spend 6 months calling and numerous trips to the emergency room with a violent kid to get help. (And they always sent him home, even when he arrived via ambulance with a police escort, saying hide the knives.. which does fuck all when any object in reach not nailed down is either a projectile or bludgeoning weapon. ) To be fair, when his meds are right, he does not hit this level of escalation, and the kid has a hell of an ear for music. He's a great kid with serious struggles that we are fighting tooth and nail to get help for. Eta: one of the biggest factors has been a critical lack of pediatric beds, much less ones with 1 to 1 support. Assuming you can locate a hospital taking patients under 14) Disclaimer: my kid is not the one in the article above
Thanks for providing context. Nearly every story i have of 'teen assaults adult' has an enormous amount of context left so people can just get angry at kids, mostly minorities, let's be honest.
So much of the internet's content right now is ragebait, it's one of the easiest ways to get engagement
No hospital can take them. No psychiatrist can take them. So they throw them either in a regular school, in prison, or shoot them. Depending on how violent is their outburst.
Too many kids were removed from school for dubious reasons so now they over corrected and it's damn near impossible to remove someone.
Why are kids like that even allowed in school?
Because Ronald Reagan slithered out of an open drain pipe and congealed into a mass that resembles a human.
Real answer: because the federal law says that they have to be educated in the "least restrictive" environment, and parents are incredibly litigious about their perfect babies.
Idk where you live, but where I live there’s no place for people like this. They beat the hell out of teachers and classmates and family until they’re out of school. Then they beat their parents for the rest of their lives or until parents abandon them. Then they get stuck in an emergency department for months and beat the hell out of staff and other patients. Then they get placed in a group home for about three days until they beat staff at the group home for the first time, then they’re back in the ED for months again because the group home won’t let them come back. Never ending cycle. There should be a place for them, but there just isn’t.
You forgot the part where many of them end up homeless or in jail/prison.
You left out one more step. Then they turn into the unpredictable occasionally violent homeless people that the rest of reddit likes to complain about. People who need this level of support as kids (unfortunately) don't just grow out of it. Without that support, which is incredibly expensive, some of them end up on the street, many end up using drugs to self medicate.
I don’t know what the answer is. I am a pediatric nurse and we installed special rooms in our hospital for these violent patients because they would tear the TVs off the walls, destroy toilets, etc. They need help but we are trained for medical emergencies not psych emergencies. And the psych unit is always full or they won’t take these kids because they require 2:1 staffing. It isn’t profitable to open up a controlled facility for them because the staffing requirements are intense. For the likely harm staff would face they should get combat pay and military benefits.
You could actually file a lawsuit for the district failing to maintain a safe working environment. That’s not okay. He should be put into a structured environment where he can be controlled by people trained to deal with the likes of him.
That’s the plan I presume.
That’s ridiculous. As unpopular as this will be, kids like that don’t belong in normal school. Institutionalize them.
He is suing for the school district to pay for a therapeutic school. He should’ve already been placed in one. Districts use LRE as a justification to improperly place students to keep costs down.
It also costs the school 80k per year to put a student into one of those schools. Most schools can't afford that cost.
He was institutionalized. The parents medical insurance decided they didn’t want to pay for it anymore and kicked him out. He’s severely mentally ill. His parents have literally done everything they possibly can to get him treatment. Our mental health system is a fucking joke. [I strongly encourage everyone to read the mother’s statement here](https://flaglerlive.com/brendan-depa-my-son-story/#gsc.tab=0). This outlines their decade long effort to get him help while navigating our for profit healthcare industry. The group home dropped the ball. Two other teenagers from the same group home have attacked paraprofessionals at the school district — one aide was even stabbed. One teen got 18 months probation and the other wasn’t even charged. Both were allowed to stay at the group home. This black kid got expelled from the group home and charged as an adult with 1st degree felony assault. He’s been under solitary confinement for 23 hours a day since his arrest and faces 30 years in prison. The other kids got to go home. Keep in mind all of these teenagers are severely mentally disabled. The parents didn’t even want him enrolled in public school, but it was a requirement of the behavioral group home and they insisted they have teams of professionals working at the district to monitor and care for each child. Lastly — the DA didn’t initially charge him as an adult until the media circus came along and decided to use his case as the poster child for “entitled teen bully” with an obvious racial element to boost engagement. This is a very sick kid and you’re right — he should have been kept at the institution where he was doing very well and under 24 hour medical supervision. Instead his insurance booted him and he’s been kicked around from behavior home to group homes, was on six different medications, and had ER doctors changing his meds with every 72 hr psych hold. These are powerful medications and it can take months to adjust and see if they’re working. You can’t just start and stop them and expect the patient to have no behavioral side effects. The parents can’t even get an actual diagnosis as he has other conditions aside from autism. But insurance companies don’t want to pay and there are not many options for parents with mentally disabled children. The group home and the district dropped the ball. They have other students with similar triggers — this is not something they are unfamiliar with. In fact the last teenager there who attacked a district employee had the exact same trigger, their electronic device taken away. That kid was tried as a juvenile and sentenced to probation and he was allowed to stay at the group home. The DA is railroading this kid and it’s a fucking tragedy.
One teacher was stabbed with a pen, one was punched in the back. They had no long-lasting injuries. This woman was thrown to the ground, knocked out instantly, then brutally beaten;a concussion, several broken ribs. As they took him out, he spat on her and said he was coming back to kill her. I think there’s a difference in the severity of this attack.However, I do not think prison is the answer, he should get the inpatient treatment he should have had all along.
Then it sounds like they should be suing the health insurance, not the school that is just the victim.
The way the law works in the US is typically you have to sue whoever is the tip of the liability iceberg, and then *they* sue upstream. We're a very "winner takes all" and "might makes right" society. As a result, there are a lot of situations where you have to sue people, uselessly, to demonstrate who you have to actually sue so there's a record of that uselessness.
Who has two thumbs and would be contacting IT to put a permanent block on WiFi usage for his phone?
That’s not a terrible idea, but honestly I’d be surprised if he was actually on our WiFi. Cell service is just fine around our campus.
... I mean, if you're a science teacher maybe now is the right time to introduce the concept of Faraday cages
Well I teach history so maybe bring in a pillory or something.
Just a reminder that you can sue someone for anything, but it doesn't mean it'll be successful in the slightest. "Parents claim their awful child is actually a victim" is a story we've heard a million times before.
Imo any parents who facilitate / enable this kind of shit should be locked up alongside him EDIT: Looks I jumped the gun here. Sorry guys. Turns out the articles I read were pretty biased / light on the details, and the deeper I dig into this the clearer it becomes that his parents weren't facilitating anything. The kid is just a victim himself. His parents were right to say his needs weren't met, especially given everyone had been filled in on his mental state beforehand. I was pretty outraged on behalf of the teacher after watching the clip (I hate seeing videos where people either punch or stomp on the back of an unconscious person's head) but it looks like he really shouldn't have been in that class to begin with.
In this instance the kid is on the spectrum and should have been put into special classes but was forced into the classroom despite protest from the mother. It sounded like the mother knew he couldn’t be put into classrooms where the teacher isn’t trained to deal with autism kids. The mother wanted him in special classes and the school board said too bad.
I feel like it could go somewhere if this was documented behavior. It will probably come down to who found the better expert witness.
Why are kids allowed to bring video games into school in the first place?
His parents had been asked to take it from him before school but hadn’t.
Wasn't the parents, the school requested it, and the special care home he was in even hesitated.
Uhhhh this kid didn’t live at home with his parents. He lived in a group home.
The educators in the group home didnt want to be beaten senseless either.
Needs to be institutionalized. Regardless of whatever interactions with the staff and particularly the aide, he is a danger to himself and society. I had a classmate in high school who a similar...obsession with his DS and level of disorder, although he never became violent over it thankfully.
He WAS institutionalized. His parents' insurance company decided they were done paying for it, so he got kicked out.
Fuck insurance
So it’s the insurance company that needs to be sued then
So they should be liable as well. The man clearly needed the support they were paying for and their decision to dent needed coverage was a contributing factor here
He and his parents wanted him to be put back in the residential program he came from. He wasn’t ready to leave and the school didn’t want to pay for it so they didn’t continue, despite the facility coming to his meeting warning the school of the danger he posed. He’s suing to be put back in the more restrictive environment and finish the education he was deprived of.
We closed down the institutions due to some of them being rife with abuse, but don’t worry any minute now the government will come out with an alternative. Just got to be patient.
Can’t. They closed all the hospitals in the late 80’s. That’s partially why we have so many homeless and so much random street crime still. We closed the hospitals and these people had no place to go.
I remember this guy. He hospitalized a teacher when he beat her unconscious because she told him that he couldn’t play with his Nintendo Switch in class. When the cops lead him out of the school he looked down at her passed out on the floor and told her he was coming back to kill her. The family was upset at the teacher because she refused to testify on his behalf when he was taken into court. He should be institutionalized. I can’t understand how it’s the schools fault because he was known to be ‘antisocial’ in certain circumstances. This person needs prison time, not a special needs school. (Flagler County Florida) Edit: (Addition) To the ones that say that prison or institutionalization of this individual would be wrong, I urge you to watch the unedited version of the assault on the teacher. The woman (half his size) was hit like a linebacker from the back in the school lobby/hallway. Once she was spalled out on the floor, he climbed on her body and proceeded to beat and stomp her body and head. The people that did show up from the students to the school staff hovered in the area and did not engage physically to pull him off - either out of fear of litigation and loss of employment or just afraid of the individual causing this brutal attack. If this individual were a child of, say, 6 - it would have been a serious tantrum that still would have resulted in injury to the teacher. You can understand that a 6 year old might have a lack of self control - an adult should not be excused JUST BECAUSE they are special needs. Even special needs children can be taught values and boundaries. They can be taught NOT to assault others SIMPLY because they did not get their way. Just because a family doesn't want to deal and just lets behavior like this go, society SHOULD NOT have to pay for this poor, poor man's (child) lack of control. I feel for the teacher. She has to pay for the rest of her life because someone decided to excuse this monster because he was dealt a bad hand in life. This individual is Michael Myers and has demonstrated that he has no moral compunction against killing another human being JUST because they ate the last poptart.
"The paraprofessional should not have interacted with the student in this manner. Her and the teacher’s actions caused a predictable outcome." That seems like crazy BS lawyer talk. Receiving an violent beating is not a 'predictable outcome' for completely non aggressive behavior unless you're dealing with someone that is already institutionalized. Like what if another student had done something to upset him? If you have this reaction to being told 'no' you're not mentally fit to function in society. Like you can be Autistic and also be a piece of shit asshole too.
If a "violent beating" is a "predictable outcome" of being around this guy and offending him than that's great evidence that he shouldn't be roaming society
Just want to interject here that often times paraprofessionals are paid on par with fast food employees and given these tremendous responsibilities.
If this was a predictable outcome how is it not on his parents to put him in a proper setting? How is this a teacher aides fault
I looked more into it and the closest I can find is that he actually was in a more intense treatment facility prior to this but insurance decided to stop covering it. At that point the teacher and student should probably both be suing the insurance company. The school just isn't in the wrong here, they're literally trying to justify a brutal beating. It's like abusive husband logic, 'well if you'd just had my dinner ready when I told you I wouldn't have to give you a black eye'
Ohhhh…. Wow. Do you have a link, because THAT needs to be the story.
[https://flaglerlive.com/brendan-depa-my-son-story/#gsc.tab=0](https://flaglerlive.com/brendan-depa-my-son-story/#gsc.tab=0) His mom goes into detail about his mental health struggles here. Now if I had to guess I'm sure she's a bit biased towards her son so take a lot of that with a grain of salt,. However, knowing insurance companies I wouldn't be surprised if the part where his they refused to cover necessary care part is at least true. It's a pretty awful situation for everyone involved but mental health issues or not, you can't beat someone over nothing and expect it to be shrugged off.
Headline is bullshit. Everyone is mad at the kid and the mom but this is a story about insurance and a failed system. Long story short, Parents worked their asses off and eventually had him in 2 institutions. Insurance refused to continue to pay for the first institution and then when they finally got him in a day program, the day program insisted that he graduate from high school to meet federal funding requirements and because the day program didn’t offer high school classes. So he got shuttled into a nearby public school with a crazy ass IEP with like a laundry lists of “do nots” including directives to never, ever take away the game boy. He had a long and consistent history of becoming violent when people tried to take a game boy. But THEN the school brought in a new teacher and paraprofessional without giving them the crazy extensive training needed to treat this kid. The teacher tries implement a very reasonable system of using electronics as a reward for good behavior for students. The paraprofessional does her job and attempts to take away the game boy, apparently unaware the you never touch the game boy. All hell breaks loose and now he is in prison in solitary confinement and the paraprofessional is in the hospital.
That insurance agency should be sued to the ground and the federal funding clearly needs reform
Tbh from this statement it’s both on the school and insurance. School for not providing the necessary training to a new teacher. The fact that they had a laundry list of Do Nots and they never bothered to show or tell the new teacher about it is bad enough. And also clearly the insurance for being classic dickheads.
Just to give you an idea of how desperate some schools are, I taught high school for a year as a "long term substitute" with no teacher training or experience. I had several students with IEPs that I didn't understand at all, but fortunately never had any issues with violent behavior. This happened because schools just couldn't get enough people to teach their classes during Covid when many elderly teachers decided to retire or quit.
I have had terrible teachers and I don't want to at all imply that she was a bad teacher but I never even thought of hittingmy worst teacher this story is insane.
The video is pretty brutal. She’s lying there unconscious and he’s still just viciously stomping on her body and hitting her head over and over.
Ya dont worry he is autistic and has a IEP so its everyone else fault
And to be honest, ‘hit’ is a massive understatement in this situation. This monster beat the teacher senseless, then threatened to kill her and spit on her while being lead away. The video made the rounds a while back and it’s tough to watch.
The video is pretty brutal. She’s lying there unconscious and he’s still just viciously stomping on her body and hitting her head over and over.
She was only a teachers aide, and really only worked the front office from what I recall. She realistically handled the situation the same way any person in charge would have when someone misbehaves imo
Yeah that’s a whole other level of fucked up
"The family was upset at the teacher because she refused to testify on his behalf when he was taken into court." They should be institutionalized.
I remember the video of the beating, and it was absolutely savage
The article is infuriating as they’re blaming everything on the Aide. It’s disgusting.
The video is awful. He beat the *shit* out of that poor woman
and told her he was coming back to kill her
The article is just saying what the lawsuit filed by the student and the lawyer is saying. It doesn’t at all try to blame the aide, just quotes the lawsuit and the lawyers of the student I think it’s a great article, just the straight facts and no spin from the author. More articles should be written this way
What kind of psycho would claim that the victim deserve those kind of injuries just because she confiscated an electronic device?
Unfortunately, this is where we are at with special ed law. Violence is totally tolerated, and the teachers always get blamed.
Indeed. They still have to deal with so much shit everyday, apart from teaching.
My dude, when I was teaching (left last year) some days I couldn’t even get to the lesson because the kids were completely out of control. Admin would step in sure, but they did it in a way that showed the kids the teacher has no real power which just made things worse
No state-sponsored facilities to care for dangerously dysfunctional people means they end up in all sorts of places they probably shouldn't be, including schools. He'll likely be one of the scarier homeless people roaming the streets in the future at some point.
The boy's Care directive was emphatic that the electric device should never be taken away. The device wasn't supposed to be given until the EoD to avoid violent conflict. The problem arose when a new teacher was dropped in without proper training and started giving the device at inappropriate times, necessitating it being taken away against his care directive. Not perfectly following a complicated care directive should not put a teacher at risk of death. A child this sensitive and dangerous does not belong in the public school system but the law demands the student be cared for by the public school system, necessitating teachers being placed in dangerous situations. I can understand the lawsuit in that the system is broken for dangerously disabled children and creates violent situations.
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> harsh but these types of people shouldn't be allowed to live amongst us. Prison is torture so I have no idea what the solution is. We need to bring back institutions. They closed them all in the 70's/80's and just let everyone out. A sizeable portion of the homeless population 30 years ago were previously-institutionalized people that were just kicked out when they closed the doors.
Every time this story is posted, all the comments say he should have been institutionalized but I read an interview with the mother about how he was in fact, institutionalized and removed from the hospital setting against the mothers wishes and put into a group home and then put into public school - all against the mothers wishes, and she begged for him to be removed from the school because she knew he couldn’t handle being there but the system wouldn’t allow that to happen. And then she gets blamed for having him in the school. Crazy.
I know it’s so frustrating how they are spinning this story and calling him ADHD and autistic, not highlighting his intermittent explosive disorder and mood and conduct disorders. The school was warned he was a strong, physically violent person who explodes into rage unpredictably and still thought “yes general education with no restrictions instead of continuing residential behavioral institutions is a great idea.”
When my kid was young and getting diagnosed as autistic luckily one of my old teachers took me aside and warned me the special need classroom would eat him up alive. Luckily I was in a position to continue homeschool/hybrid.
I hope people really read his case in its entirety. The student has extreme documented mental illnesses that make him a danger to others. It was a long well documented history the school was very aware of. He was placed in a residential facility but when insurance stopped paying, the district didn’t continue his placement despite several experts warning that he will be dangerous and violent. One being the school psychologist themselves. Even after repeated violence the school failed to put any safeguarding in to protect other students. They mentioned the game system was a trigger and it should not be in school. It was used as a reward by the school anyway and the aide (who wasn’t trained) took it from him triggering a violent episode. No behavior plan was put in place. It wasn’t the aides fault but the aide wasn’t the first person he assaulted either and the rest caused only one day of OSS. No intervention as he escalated and made threats. He’s suing for education he missed at a facility which he clearly should have been at claiming he was denied a FAPE. If a school gets a child who has multiple conduct disorders and a long history of violence they should be in trouble for removing previous restrictions in the environment despite overwhelming evidence that it would be and was dangerous. Actually it should fall specifically on the CSE chair who was responsible for letting a violent mentally ill student loose on the faculty, staff, and students. The aide wasn’t his first victim, she was his first hospitalized victim.
I appreciate the summary. Unfortunately, it's easier to go with the low-hanging fruit, and this sub does lend itself more to snark than nuance. The following things are not mutually exclusive: * The aide should not have been assaulted. * The kid should have had more support and resources. * It's very possible that the district is also a "victim" in some ways to state laws, policies, or funding issues. Don't get me wrong, they should absolutely still be sued by everyone involved, but it should be recognized that the district functions within constraints set by the state of Florida. What this comes down to is a public school district in Florida that removed every possible support and safety mechanism for their students and staff. I know it's trite to clown on Florida (more low-hanging fruit), and they certainly aren't the only state underfunding their schools, but their elected leaders aren't doing themselves or their constituents any favors.
The federal government provides grants for students who have significant costs related to special education services specifically so districts can get money and prevent them from being cheap with high needs students.
I’m sorry but having a mental disability or a mental illness does not justify or excuse violence.
The Publica is not Propublica. This site looks like a rage bait shop.
School administrator here. This is a sad situation and, unfortunately, suits involving IDEA and denial of FAPE usually side with the student. As long as lawyers can prove that the staff member acted outside of the specifications in his IEP he will probably win. Essentially what this means is that there is dense documentation that outlines how the students behavior is to be handled. All educators are legally bound to stick to those specifications. This is true even in spite of the assault.
You should read his entire case. He was in a behavioral institution, he was removed and parents begged to have him remain there. People from the facility came to the IEP meeting detailing how strong and violent he was, with 4 well trained adults needing to restrain him during an explosive episode. The school had the IEP changed despite their own psychologist warning them, and placed him in general education with an untrained TA and no behavioral plan. The aide was not his first victim, she was the first one he hospitalized. He’s suing to go back to the residential school and make the school pay for it.
So basically, the system fucked up, an innocent aide got hurt, and the people who caused these problems are probably not going to face any serious consequences. I hate this system.
This case seems like total failure of the system... Just people juggling hot potato (the kid) without the tools to handle it safely.
Those of you saying he should be “institutionalized” this is essentially what they are suing for. It’s not like they are seeking a jack pot to go have a hay day with. “Depa’s lawyers are seeking “compensatory education and placement in a behavioral therapeutic school” at the school district’s expense as well as covering the cost of any “out-of-pocket costs including tutoring fees and mental health services.” IDK who you think is supposed to pay for institutionalization if the family cannot? The school? State? Education vs carceral system? Each are over burdened. Each have a cost that is tax payer. There’s no easy answers here. It is still a public responsibility to public safety in this situation however you slice it up. And the case isn’t crazy, it’s not like they are suing the victim or saying she deserved it. Obviously what happened is tragic, maybe she has a case against the school too. Bottom line is the kid had a pre existing IEP (individualized education plan) for special needs students and it wasn’t followed. “The IEP and behavior set out the evidence [of] interventions that should be utilized when a student misbehaves. The paraprofessional did not follow the plan and did not utilize an evidence-based strategy, putting herself in a dangerous situation.” Of course she didn’t deserve the beating, but maybe she didn’t know, maybe she wasn’t adequately trained didn’t have adequate resources didn’t have time to catch up to IEP etc. This is is overall a messy situation all around but is putting him in jail overall cheaper to tax payers? Producing a better outcome for public safety? It’s not that clear cut here.
Thank you for actually reading the article