Best and Worsts

Recent I joined a sped educators’ board over on LinkedIn recently, “Special Education Innovators.” I’m not a special educator but I like to think some of them would like to have a parent’s perspective now and then.

Discussions are half the fun of LinkedIn groups, and when things are slow I like to pose a question. So I posted: “What’s the best and worst thing for educators when it comes to dealing with parents of kids with special needs?”

Image: usgarchives.net

I got two responses, both insightful.

“The Best?” replied one group member, “Concerned parents who are honest with themselves about their child’s needs. They are generally better informed, and maintain a healthy collaboration with educators and related service providers. The Worst: An aggressive, uninformed parent who comes to school once a year to make unreasonable demands for academic results. They rarely even check their child’s bookbag for teacher communication. Parents who work two jobs, group home guardians, and unconcerned parents rarely make any contact with professionals.”

(Two jobs? Will this economy spare no aspect of our lives, not even parent-teacher conferences?)

“The best thing you can do is stay informed and involved in your child’s education and have realistic goals and dreams for him or her,” replied another member. “Also, make sure your expectations for the teacher and school staff are reasonable, as well. Most teachers I know welcome open communication between home and school and an informed, supportive parent is wonderful. The problems come when the parent becomes so focused on his or her child that he or she forgets the teacher has other students for whom she’s responsible, as well as other school-related activities, and begins to put unreasonable demands on the teacher’s time and attention.”

We’ve tried to adhere to these rules with Alex and his teachers. We send at least as many notes back to school as we receive, and have often been the ones initiating exchanges. We slate our parent/teacher conferences outside the set and regimented days and hours, as long as his teacher agrees, because we figure it gives the teacher more time to talk to us and more brain space to think about Alex. Jill also teaches knitting every Friday morning in Alex’s class, so gets a chance to see how he’s doing real and close up.

The Alex we’ve seen in the classroom – velcroing the right date to the wall calendar, leading the “Pledge of Allegiance,” taking classmates by the hand – is often heads above the Alex we see at home, where every afternoon off the bus he just wants to shed his khakis and munch a few pretzels on the way into evening. The Alex we see in the classroom, I like to think, is more like the grown-up Alex we’ll someday launch into the world. Seeing him this way is well worth shuffling the schedules and making time to stay informed. Hope it stays that way after one of us has to get a second job.