Oh, believe me, teachers would love nothing better than to leave the Social Work to Social Workers. Unfortunately, the national mindset, for too long, has been something along the lines of "well the kids need this and they're with teachers 8 hours a day (a falsehood, by the way), so we'll just have 'the schools' do it!" I'm not sure how they figured the math on that one because even if we use their falsehood of 8 hours, that still leaves 16 hours in a day that they are supposedly under the purview of their parental units, whatever that might consist of (and that's one of the other issues).
When you take the following events and toss them all together, we get what we have today:
- more women entered the workforce (because we COULD!)
- economy has been a back & forth mess since the early 80's, which actually forced more women into the workforce due to economic necessity, even those who wanted to devote their time to the worthy task of making a home and raising children.
- the Government and businessmen decided to stick their fingers into the last untapped market for profits - education
- "No Child Left Behind" -- an admirable concept but poorly executed because politicians created it without the input of boots on the ground teachers, who could have told folks that it was literally IMPOSSIBLE to have EVERY child succeed at 100% on a test! (what planet were these guys from anyway????), and thus began the real decline of our educational system
- LRE (Least Restrictive Environment) was implemented which essentially forced our Special Ed students to fail everywhere else before getting to the environment that any Special Ed teacher could have told folks they needed in the first place! Those of us working in the most restrictive level at that time, could see the writing on the wall --- failure for our students, and lost educational time and possible physical harm for the other students (I worked with Emotional Disturbance/Behavior disordered kids, some with psychiatric issues & legal problems. Yes, those students had to "fail" in a regular classroom and through more limited options until they finally got to us, where we could get them what they needed and then send them back up the levels.)
- FOL (Fear of Lawsuits) by the school districts. A lot of what you are seeing now is a result of this. Crazy lawsuit awards result in everyone being afraid to do "anything" that they might get sued for, and add in press exposure (because everyone with a hangnail calls the news these days), and this opens up cargo containers of useless, time-wasting "mandates".
I could go on about "Race to the Top" (No Child Left Behind with a different name), "Woke" politics, political correctness, moral fiber breakdowns, urban power centers vs. the "rest of us" rural folks, but I won't.
By law, all special d students must FIRST be served within the overall school environment - mixed in with everyone else. Their IEP must specify what supports they will receive, who will provide them, how many hours of service they will receive, etc., etc., with an Annual Review to determine if that IEP still meets their needs. This was put into place in order to ensure that students are not placed in a treatment center or isolated from their school peers and opportunities without justification - A noble and righteous goal! Unfortunately, as with ALL government initiated mandates, no one bother to check with folks who actually had to DO the implementation, to see if it was doable and practical. And there, once again, is the FLAW in the plan.
I've had several students go through the elementary school that I worked at, that every adult in that building could have told you, had no chance at all of succeeding in that environment due to needs that we just couldn't meet while dealing with 400-700 other children. In most cases, it took us an entire year to do all of the paperwork, etc., requirements to even get that child "looked at" by someone outside the building for a POSSIBLE placement outside our school. In the meantime, the students in class with these kids had to put up with being attacked, losing instructional time, classroom disruptions, etc. And it wasn't the fault of the child with special needs - their actions were the result of their disability, and exacerbated by not having their needs met in a way that helped them! So, everyone loses while we jump through hoops and red tape created by folks who have no idea what the reality is like.
It anyone should be "blamed" for the mess, I'd like to nominate politicians who don't listen to ANYONE, and lawyers.
Sorry for the rant. This is a trigger area for me.
