Re: Toronto Star – Mom Fights for School Supports for Son

[Ivriniel]

Speaking as a Toronto teacher, the entire Special Education system is screwed up. When I was at the faculty of Education, we talked about how the ideal model of Special Education was for there to be a variety of options for placement for Special Education students, so you could put the kid where their needs were best met. In Toronto, we have a one-size fits almost all, and it really doesn’t work.

About 8 years ago, the TDSB closed most of its self-contained classrooms and sent the kids back to their home schools. To replace the self-contained classes the board allocated 1 special education teacher to each school, regardless of the size of the school. 200 kids, or 1000 kids, they all got one. What’s more the board left it up to each individual school to decide how that teacher’s program would be set up.

I’ve seen kids with profound learning needs, dumped in the regular classroom for 1/2 days. I remember one girl who was Grade 4 age, but could only recognize a few letters of the alphabet, and not even all the letters in her own name. She spent her mornings in a Special Ed class for language and math, but was expected to take Science, Social Studies, Art, Music, French, etc, in a regular classroom. Needless to say, her program had to be heavily modified.

I’ve spent 2/3 of a school year trying to get a student seen by the In School Support Team. (This was mostly due to an immature VP who didn’t want to have a lot of meetings of the team, and set up a system where teachers had to jump through a whole lot of hoops just to get kids seen.)

It also doesn’t help that there is very little special education in the curriculum in Faculties of Ed. When I went through the Faculty we had a total of 24 hours of Special Ed in the whole program. Looking at the Course components on the OISE website, it doesn’t look like things have changed very much.

REPORT ABUSE