Also, please profile the principals at the schools who embrace those classrooms (e.g. Sankofa, Howard, Bella Vista, etc.) There are so many structural disincentives for schools to protect these valuable and essential educational settings, especially in times of lack. We should celebrate those principals and school communities who do.

We need real portraits of Special Education experiences. What gets reported is usually just numbers and not the every day lived reality of educators and families. That reality swings between hopeful and grim.

You should have stayed on topic…you could have praised Shaler without mentioning Slater…period. Like anyone would have known (or cared) about your error as you praised a worthy teacher who obviously knows her stuff.

As for some “truth”…your 7-year old second grader ate what you, the parent, provided. So it totally “rests on you”, especially if you gave Ms. Slater permission to give your child candy. And you are truly fooling yourself if you think a few M&Ms had any impact on your child’s weight gain. As a Pediatric Nurse for the past 20 years, I’d change my pediatrician immediately if he allowed me a “free pass” as a parent to assign blame to another, rather than accepting the consequences of my family’s eating habits. And, unless your son “coincidentally” lost all of that weight the next year, after leaving Ms. Slater’s class, then get a mirror and take a long look at the cause of your son’s weight issues.

Yaz, you don’t like my stating my experience – that an introduction of a new reward system that was effective in teaching my son, also coincided with a negative consequence to his physical well-being – but I’ll stand by the facts and truth of my earlier statement. It never even occurred to me to lie, or make up some sort random cover story about my teachers’ names confusion. I like simple truth, since I never have to keep track of which “fiction” (i.e. lie) has to be maintained with whom and where.

Parents and teachers should be aware of all the potential positives and negatives of a teaching technique when they’re using it or considering trying it with a student.

Oh, and the teacher checked with parents (and possibly with the principal or other district staff too) before she began giving the rewards. Anyway, the “shame” of our kid having a weight problem rests at least as much with us, his parents, as it does with any teacher. Even with the benefits of hind-sight, I think we’d have made the same decision – give the rewards – because it *worked*.

Since our then-little guy had a build like mine (naturally thin) at the time, we didn’t foresee any problem with trying it to see if it got him talking more after a completely stalled 1st grade where he made no progress. Boy did it! After 3rd grade, he was out of SDC and in a regular general ed classroom because his language skills had progressed to age and grade-level appropriate.

Oh, and I would have given the 3rd grade Communication Specialist teacher’s name for Katy, too, because she was brilliant (she had her class competing at the M. L. King Oratorical that February). But she took early retirement at the end of the school year when the state took over the district and moved to So. Cal. so she’s not available.

And now, I really hope we’ll get back on-topic, and Katy will get a long list of people in the district who would make great interview subjects.

The misidentified Mrs. Slater was Julie Slater, a Speech and Language handicap teacher who had our boy in 2nd grade at either Tilden or Marshall in a Special Day Class for communication handicapped students. She was pretty good too. Although her use of food rewards (M&Ms) in the classroom was very effective with our son, it coincided with the beginning of his weight problems.