When comments from SPAM make the blog...

When you have a blog, you find that sometimes interesting comments get caught up in the spam filter. While most of them are truly spam, from time to time, there are some that make you go hmmm.

I continue to get comments from a person who allegedly has info about the principal's meetings that Dr. Lathan conducts. Apparently there is a good deal of berating of principals going on and something about the use of a microphone. Another one of the more recent comments that caught my eye is that principals are being berated for to many students receiving an "F" grade. 

As I read through the comments on the original San Diego Unified piece, in which an administrator accused Dr. Lathan of a lack of focused leadership, I noticed this comment from the Editor of the piece:

"... the district had plenty of funding to provide training for both teachers and principals. Largely thanks to the influx of federal stimulus dollars, the district was in the rare position of having enough money to provide training to just about everybody who needed it.

For once, the problem wasn't funding, but a lack of focused leadership. The training was there, but many teachers and principals didn't take the district up on it, and weren't required to."

Although that article was about inclusion, it had some interesting parallels to what I was hearing about the roll out of District 150's new gifted program. However, it left me wondering about what is going on with inclusion in District 150? Are students needs being serviced? What about the low achievers, for whom summer school is no longer offered? Are the "F" grades a result of those students not being able to keep up the pace without extra help? 

I remember hearing at one time that Glen Oak and Harrison Community schools would be year round. A year round school would certainly give the slow learners the opportunity to catch up. What has happened to that plan? Didn't the District receive enough federal stimulus dollars to implement such a program? 

Word is also out that teachers are now responsible for writing their own special education IEP's and holding their own IEP conferences. My question is, do all teachers have training in the area of students with special needs and more importantly - do they have the time? Special needs could range from students with learning disabilities, to downs syndrome, to true mental retardation. I personally consider all of the above serious stuff. If I were a parent with a special needs student, I would want a professional trained in giving a diagnosis, not just some rank and file teacher. 

One can't help but notice, that so much of what is said to be going on in 150 sounds EXACTLY like the complaints coming from San Diego. Major changes, no training and no mandates from the Board. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but the Superintendent does not operate in a vacuum,  the Board is just as responsible for focused leadership as the Superintendent.

Superintendent Grenita Lathan being blamed for problems in San Diego Unified's special education program

Today I heard about how it was going for teachers who are now teaching gifted classes in District 150. They are excited to have the opportunity. The only problem is, the teachers I heard about have not had any training, the principal was not given any resources, there were no materials purchased and there is no directive on what the teachers should be teaching. When the teachers registered to receive training on gifted education at a seminar in Chicago, the District Administration denied the request. This sounds a lot like the San Diego Unified issue:

 San Diego Unified's Big Special Ed Shift

It was the biggest change in the way San Diego Unified educates its students with special needs in a decade, and we wanted to know how the district had coped with the transition.

In 2008, after a report concluded that children with disabilities were too often being segregated into separate classrooms, the district began a concentrated effort to include far more children with special needs in general education classrooms in their neighborhood schools.

The shift required a complex reorganization of where kids with special needs would go to school. Rather than being grouped at relatively few sites that focused on special education, thousands of students with disabilities instead began flooding into their local schools.

Here are the conclusions we came to:

• Interviews with more than two dozen teachers, principals, experts and parents revealed a haphazard rollout of the new special education model that was plagued by a lack of vision and leadership.

• On the issue of training, specifically, there was confusion. Despite advocates pushing for mandatory training for teachers, nobody at the district ever tried to make that happen.

• There's also disagreement about how principals were trained for the big change. The top official at the district's Special Education Division says she was blocked from approaching principals to tell them about training. But that claim is refuted by her former boss, who no longer works in San Diego.

• What's clear is that individual schools were essentially left to work out how to make the move on their own, with little help from the district.

• Though many schools say they have now ironed out most of the kinks in making the transition, that's taken time and has placed undue stress on teachers while impacting the education of kids with special needs and the children they now share classrooms with.

• Some principals said three years later they're still struggling to implement the new model, as each year they must learn to teach children with disabilities they have not encountered at the school before.

Why Training Was Never Mandated

Back in October, we described how many general education teachers at the district were suddenly faced with teaching children with special needs, despite having no training on how to do so.What we didn't tell you was why the district never made that training compulsory for the thousands of teachers making the transition.

Here's why: Nobody at the district ever tried to make training mandatory, despite being urged to do so by some advocates of the change.

Arguably the district's biggest challenge in implementing the new approach was convincing skeptical teachers and principals that it was the right thing to do. An effective way to do that was to get those teachers into training sessions, to show them the benefits of inclusion, said Marvin Elementary School Principal E. Jay Derwae.

"Of course training should have been mandatory. You have to make sure everybody buys into the new paradigm shift, and you've got to be able to hold teachers' hands through the changes."

Jay Derwae

Many Principals Weren't Trained Either

While the decision that more inclusion was needed came down from the higher echelons of the district, the foot soldiers in the effort to make the change a reality were individual school principals. Like teachers, many principals at the district needed crucial training to help them assimilate their new found students with special needs into their schools. And there were practical considerations too, like how to set up "sensory rooms" where children with certain disabilities could cool down after getting upset.

Special education training was never mandated for principals either. And there's more.

Susan Martinez, executive director of the district's Special Education Division, said she was told principals were too busy to hear about additional training. She said she was told not to attend meetings with principals, and was barred from putting information about training on the district's website.

"Because of the way the system was, we were not allowed access to principals. So, the word was out there that we didn't want to work with principals," Martinez said. "We would say 'We can do training, we want to do training, but we're not allowed to.'"

Asked who barred her from approaching principals, Martinez named Grenita Lathan, who used to serve as a deputy superintendent and is now superintendent of a school district in Peoria, Ill.

Lathan said Martinez's claim is untrue. She said she'll be contacting the district. Source