Not as safe as you think

Your children are loved in school. Regardless of ability, personality, someone in your child’s school cares deeply about seeing them thrive and become someone who does their best. The problem is that that person may now be with ten students that have greater needs than your child.

I worked in a school district last year, and people were spread thin at the school I was at, and I substitute for the same district this year and things are untenable. Any belief that your children are safe at each school is an illusion. There are safer schools than others. The lack of safety is not brought on by any malicious planning within the school, but out of hope that more people will eventually come to help.

The district hierarchy cares far less than the individuals than the schools though. They look at your students, and dollar signs flash on their tiny foreheads, and they try to think of how many students it would take to get the accounting straight, and they pretend fewer adults are needed than really are, so they can make peace with their amoral decisions to load classes with kids they don’t have help for.

The reality is that the school I currently am working in has five full time Paraprofessionals and sixteen kids that have extraordinary needs that need to be met daily. What this means for the kids that don’t have someone is a higher risk of injury, higher risk of injuring a classmate, higher risk of injury of staff, when only one person can attend to a child who in a moment, may need three adults to calm them, or move them to a place where they can safely work through their distress. This also means learning opportunities are greatly reduced as well!

I’ve seen pencils thrown, laptops thrown, chairs thrown. I’ve seen pushing, punching, scratching. I’ve personally been bitten, scratched, punched, pinched, kicked, had my hair pulled, been spat upon, been screamed at. Its part of this job for the Paraprofessionals to deal with a lot, but the district I’m in places so little value on this role that they actually LOWERED THE PAY this year, they also don’t pay for lunches or the time before school that you need to be there to make sure everyone is where they need to be, so the pay is very near minimum wage! The people at the top of the hierarchy, many of them friends in the outside world, will not have any meat cut from their checks. They will not turn up in classes to help meet the extraordinary needs, but they will wait and hope for a millage to bail them out from their bad book keeping.

I implore families to go to the schools your children are in. Spend a day in their school. Volunteer in the cafeteria or at recess or in the classroom, and see what your child experiences from the day-to-day, and when the knots in your stomach begin to make you physically ill, email the members of the school board and demand better pay for the people in the schools, and ask for cuts to come from the top not the bottom, so that your child and the rest of the children in the school can be safe.

Not all districts have these issues, but more do than you could possibly imagine. Be proactive, and don’t let people fuck with your kids’ safety.