Ending Child Abuse At School

Hearing stuff like this makes me angry, why do people like this want to become teachers and principles? It is sickening to me, my son had a math teacher in 4th grade who picked on him and she was also his tutor as well because he had problems in math, I guess she had no interest in helping him but she did take interest in causing his self esteem to fall by humiliating him in class, every teacher said he was a a joy to have in class and she never made any comments, finally one day after he had enough of her treating him badly and she accused him of cheating when he had not even written anything and the boy behind him was always talking to him the teacher told him to throw his paper away but instead he crumpled it up and threw it at her and left the room crying, needless to say I had had it with this woman and I voiced my opinion and come to find out there were other classes in which she picked out one child who had problems in math to pick on.

Thank you so much for you post. I have endured the same thing and I don't give up. Until parents stop being afraid of this system that cares more about numbers and the teachers than they do parents, it will never change. My son suffered in high school at the hands of football coaches. He uses drugs, was diagnosed with severe depression and prescribed medication. Then the school refused to honor is 504 plan recommendations from his physician for an entire school year. He failed almost all of his classes.

I wrote an editorial in the community newspaper and now I am treated better, but what about the kids that don't have a parent with courage. I just pray and ask God to move those that do not mean our children any good out of the way. I also rally my friends and church members to make a point of caring for all children because we don't know what they go through in school.

I understand how you feel. My son was not diagnosed with Autism, severe speech delay and mild sensory processing disorder until last year. For two year's in public and at school I fought for my son because I had to. At one point a doctor suggested a residential home and that my son would never remember me after 3 months. My reply was this, I cried, pleaded and acted strong enough to take whatever comes our way, I begged them not to take my son away. Some of the words I remember using were "He needs his momma and I need him, without my son I have no life or reason, my boys are my only reason I am here and they need eachother too. Together my family can help my son. I still took an addtional year for the offical diganoses that took 5 minutes of the behavior doctor's time. I feel they are a wonderful, saving and brillant soal in the struggle with Autism (Dr. Lindsey, that was our angel figure with my son's struggle). The sympathetic doctor to this day, 3 years later will not look me in the eye when they see my son especially after my son gives them a hug. His school last year was great in regards to social progress but academically it was not working out as well in order for him to reach his potential. The private academy program that was thankfully saved by our governor's efforts and the help of beautiful corporations has been our saving grace for this year. We are not in the clear yet but we are not longer drowning, it’s now just a hill instead of the mountain side to overcome. My fear is the future my present is my peace. I hope your son has a wonderful set of teacher's and principals in the future, each year is a new chance for our children, special needs or typical they all deserved the best. Press on and stay encouraged as someone said to us in our time of tears when we thought the program was going to end just 2 weeks ago. There is still a need but hope never gives up, don't stop sticking up for the children because if we do, no one will stand up for them and they deserved all the love in the world from their teachers and everyone who sets their eyes on them, that's my philosophy.

My son had no physical, mental or emotional impairments. He was in a regular classroom when I began to noticed odd behaviors in him. He loved his kindergarten teacher and first grade was fun. He always like to dress nice and keep his hair neatly cut(some would take this as being uppity). However, by second or third grade everything began to change about him. He went from a young happy, excited boy who jumped from bed every morning eager to go to school. To someone who cried or pretended to be sick in order to avoid going to school. He went from a neat dresser to a sloppy dresser. He went from someone who loved getting all his homework answers correct to someone who purposely missed questions. He went from a little boy his older siblings loved to watch as he slept and laughed out in his sleep to someone who screamed out and had night terrors. I was a very active parent in school. Although, I was not always at his school. I also worked in the school system for a while. But even I had no idea the extent of what was happening to him. When he began to open up and talk, I went to the principal to tell her what was going on. Instead of her addressing the matter, she went to all the teachers and told them to watch what they did in front of my son, because he was a liar. However, most of what I learned was happening to my son came from a neighbor's child and friend of my son's who was in my son's classroom and not directly from my son. My neighbor's son was Korean and didn't have any problems with the teacher.

I finally learned that my son had been dragged down a hallway almost half the size of a football field flat on his back by a teacher, who dragged him by the strap of his backpack. I also found out the reason he began to purposely miss some of his homework questions because if he got all answers right, the teacher would accuse him of cheating. I also learned the teacher had incorporated the help of other students in the classroom to pick on my son.

Needless to say, this did great damage to my son and his self esteem that still reverberate unto this day. My son is now a 28 year old young man. But great damage was done to him back then in elementary school. Outwardly, he's achieved a lot and one a lot of great things in his life. At a very young age he developed his own website and attempted to start a small business online. He was in his teens at the time. He did graduate from high school and went on to college and even served four years in the U.S. Air Force. He has two college degrees and is working on a third. However, something was lost way back then. That happy little spontaneous boy, who jumped out of bed every morning and liked to dress neatly and get all the answers to questions was forever lost. I can see in him how he struggles with depression too and insecurity. He is married and he and his wife (also military) lives in another state. They both should graduate from college this spring. The only thing that saved my son from a total breaddown and total loss, to the degree that he was saved, was he did have a loving family who, to this day, care for him. I feel for all those other children who may not have anywhere to turn or anyone to turn to when they are abused either by family or in what should be a professional school sitting with educated professional. I feel for many children, especially poor, minority and especially minority black male children, a lot of their anti-social behavior that develop later in their teens can often be traced back to abuse in the school sitting.

I graduated from college with a degree in English and minors in Secondary Education and Journalism. As a new teacher, the first year I taught 9th and 10th grade English, I had all the students who were repeating English 9 and 10, and a couple of the students had special needs (although no one told me about these beforehand). Although I was a caring person and really wanted to enable all my students to succeed, I was not prepared to deal with the varying needs of about 140 students, many of whom were already cynical about education and had suffered from abuses in the past.
One of the first days of school, the only non-white child in the class was behaving like he was under the influence of alcohol, so I asked him if he was drunk - oh, I so wish I had known he suffered from cerebral palsy!!! That was a quick lesson to me to be careful how I thought about my students. I so wish a course had been available in undergrad about recognizing and working with the variety of young people I had. Most teachers do not desire to inflict pain on their students, but all of us need to be made more aware of how to approach students whose behavior and needs fall outside of our personal realm of experience - such courses and seminars should be required in undergrad and not only in master's and doctoral-level courses. Much abuse could be prevented if teachers had the understanding and tools to work with diverse students from the start of their careers.

I work for the chicago public schools at michele clark magnet high school. I work with special neeeds/special ed students. The problem is with the bogus IEP's that some of the students have. We have one student with cerebal palsy non verbal but when the new teacher was reviewing the IEP's they had him as a verbal student. There were several flaws in all of the student's IEP's. My first year I sat in om student's eval but did not know what the process was about and saw the anguish of the parents and how they feel about the whole process.We also need to have compassion for the family also.