Skip to main content

Petition

This is a petition forwarded from a special education teacher in Oakland.

Her email :

Hi everyone,

As many of you know, I have formed a special education coalition with other in Oakland to try to see some changes made in the level of service available to OUSD students. Less than 5 years ago, we provided a very high level of support for special education. Now speech therapists have 50-80 students on their caseloads (providing 30 minutes weekly), psychologists serve 10-12 schools (meaning they are only available for testing - often not within a reasonable time) and nurses up to 20 schools.

Although I am fortunate to have wonderful office space at Sankofa, at my other school I teach in a basement storage room filled with boxes from floors to ceiling. Some of my peers have nowhere to teach, and use the cafeteria for instruction.

Special education services need to be insured at the district level and not be dependent on individual site policy. I was only assigned an instructional assistant last week after working nearly half the year without one. A school in the hills had a full time IA for 7 learning disabled students. This is not equitable.

Please consider visiting this site and signing an electronic petition that we have generated. If it is possible for you to forward the site on to others, that would be great. Thanks!!


We have a school nurse, who I think may have been at our school since about 1950 and is great. But it's true about the speech therapists - I have a student who is very difficult to understand and is now seen for 30-45 minutes a week, only when the speech therapist doesn't have other meetings. This is not nearly enough time to see any progress.

We used to have a psychologist and in my first couple of years, I could even talk to her about students who were telling me they wanted to hurt themselves. I believe now she's assigned to our school for 3 hours a week - often she doesn't make it because of some district meeting or another. She's only available for testing kids to see if they are eligible for special ed, and doesn't even have time to do all that.

Please sign the petition.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Loss

  (I have been putting off finishing this blog post for months. You'll see why)  Today, I was cleaning a bookshelf and I found the journal from one of my third-grade students, who I call Fred in my book , in 2001. I still had it because he didn't come to the last day of school to get his stuff this year and I guess it got put in a pile and somehow I've kept it with me.  He didn't come to the last day of school, probably because his family was a mess: dad in prison, mom in an abusive relationship, all the kids (understandably) acting out violently. Fred was expelled from our school in second grade for hitting a teacher. Then he was expelled from the other school, I don't know why, at the end of second grade. He came back on the condition from the administration that he be in my class because I had him as a student in first grade and he listened to me and worked well with me.  We had a really good relationship, although Fred was definitely not easy to have in class....
Post a Comment
Read more

A New Prison, Part Two

  Second very long part of the prison visit report.   After we got all the paperwork filled out and went through the metal detector, we got visitation slips with the name of the inmate, and made our way over to the other building for visitation. This is not maximum security so thankfully you can just sit next to the inmates, and not be separated by glass or have to use a telephone to talk.    First, you get a gate unlocked and go into a holding pen that is of course in direct sunlight (or rain if it's that season) and surrounded by fences topped with razor wire. You wait there until the gate at the other end is unlocked. This holding pen was a little bigger and less claustrophobic than the other prison (I do not have any claustrophobia and I came very close to a panic attack once at the other place) and they opened the other gate more quickly. Then you walk, again in blazing sunlight (or rain) to the visitation building. This one was less of a walk than the other pri...
Post a Comment
Read more

A New Prison, Part 1

My former student, friend, and co-author was moved to a new prison during COVID. We (myself, Mitali, and his Abuela) have visited a couple of times via the video visit functionality they set up, but we've also been trying to visit in person, ever since in-person visits were allowed again. After four of them being canceled (sometimes we were told why, sometimes not), we finally got a visit. I was super nervous about this visit. (I felt better when Mitali mentioned that she was also, because she is an inherently positive and optimistic person!) I am not proud of this, but there was a large part of me that was hoping that the visit would be canceled, just like the previous four were. I felt a little better when someone I know messaged me privately to tell me that they had had very good experiences visiting a family member in that prison. But I still didn't sleep well at all that night, worrying about the guards, the many things that could go wrong, and the projected 111-degree hea...
Post a Comment
Read more