Why do they hate me?

I am sitting across the table from a group of parents who are ready to do what they seemingly relish in these monthly “collaborative, advisory” meetings. Start to grill me, as the school district special education director, about why nothing is going right in my district.

The federal special education law provides for participation of parents of students with special needs in advising the district. There is a formal body, called the Community Advisory Committee, or CAC, that meets monthly to hear reports from the special education administrators and to give feedback on policy and programs. More often than not, these sessions are bitch sessions concerning how we have failed each parent’s kid, and what is remarkable to me is how this becomes how we don’t serve any child well.

On this day the usual parents have brought in several more who don’t usually attend. Their mission today, it seems, is to tell me how my budding program for kids with autism is an abject failure. One father begins by saying that special education is so impossible to do that all the good teachers leave and all we are left with are people who don’t really care about kids and put all meaningful curriculum and instruction on the back burner. He is ignoring the presence of four current or former special educators around the table who I know are exemplary in how they work for students’ benefit. Then a mother chimes in to say that the school, when it was testing time, moved all of the special education students out of their classroom so other kids could be tested and simply put them on the playground. She claimed that the teacher asked her child what he wanted to do during an activity. “He can’t choose, he needs to be told,” she said. This parent then asserted that this is how it always is and always has been; the teachers don’t know what they are doing and so they ask the kids.

The absurdity of this galls me. I know this family’s last teacher who not only used top level curriculum but understood both autism and the needs of parents of these kids. Nevertheless, these parents complained constantly because on some measure they chose, their boy did not do well.

And then other parents chimed in, saying things like “When is the district going to do it’s part…we are!” Or “no one is paying attention to the teachers. You let them do nothing and don’t supervise them.” Or “There is no training offered for staff, still” It is all I can do to not get up and scream. This is my second year as Director of Special Education. In the first year I started a task force to determine how to set up a program for kids with autism. We had these same parents on the task force along with teachers, administrators, speech therapists, and psychologists. We made a plan, and we are slowly implementing it. Nothing like this has been done in this district for kids with autism. I am shocked at the fact that the biggest barrier to moving this program along is these parents constant criticism. It’s as if they don’t want us to succeed. They seem hell-bent on portraying us to all who will listen as cold-hearted bumblers who only care about our paychecks.

This past year, I have set up four trainings for staff on autism, the first training in the district for years. I have sent staff to many more trainings in other areas to get wisdom on autism. I have spent a huge amount of time with the staff of the school to get them up to speed. I have lobbied hard for money for staffing and for materials, a difficult thing to do when the district’s budget is so tight. The most angry parent at this meeting had a terrible teacher last year and complained constantly about him. We couldn’t tell her of course about personnel matters, but we worked hard on his case all year, ultimately getting him to resign, as it is almost impossible to fire a tenured teacher. This was a great victory for us, but this parent can’t understand why, just as she can’t acknowledge that “no training” is absolutely flatly wrong, as is the level of supervision we give our staff.

What these parents are right about is how difficult it is to get quality staff. It is rarer these days to find good special education teachers in California because the job is hard and the pay low. Most new teachers quit within three years. Their biggest complaints? Number one is the paperwork and handling the meetings, number two is dealing with the parents.

The federal government established the Education for Handicapped Children Act in 1975 with a promise of funding 40% of the states’ cost of special education programs. Congress has never authorized more than 17%, and currently it is around 13%. It costs a district in California up to $275 per student in the district over and above the money the federal government provides to offer these services, and this money comes out of a district’s general fund. So then you get a division within a district’s management over “encroachment”. “If your program didn’t cost so much money we could do that innovative program,” is a common refrain. In some districts, the word has gotten out that they can’t have a music program due to special ed encroachment, or they can’t have art classes, or they can’t serve Lobster on Thursdays.

My god people! It’s the cost of doing business! It’s the cost of serving these kids as the law forces us and best practice often dictates.