Thursday, October 13th and this week has been off the hook!

My students’ less-than-desirable behaviors have met a new level of extreme. But that’s not what I want to talk about today!

I get my emails on my phone…it helps me keep up with the most important of the 70+ emails I can get in a day. Most I can just swipe to the right and delete because they have nothing to do with me, and then the subsequent “reply all’s” to the emails I’ve already deleted, because again, nothing to do with me!

Until this afternoon when I heard the alert that I have another email, and this time the alert sounded more like a bomb exploding! Not literally, but there was just something in the chirp that made me weary of opening that email.

In my inbox an email from the Director of Special Ed! She never graces us with direct emails from her. I can count on my fingers how many I’ve gotten that came directly from her email address and this one was a doozey! So maybe it’s a good thing she doesn’t email.

What actually took up two lines of text can be interrupted as saying, “I know you all were here at the district office just a couple of days ago for a mando training where we made you sit in a conference room and discuss the same topics we make you discuss every time you come for a mando training, and even though that would have been the perfect opportunity to discuss this, I decided sending an un-personal email with your new report card attached was a better way to go! Remember that it needs to be filled out for each student and go home the same day the gen ed students get there’s which is only a couple weeks away, so get started!!”

WAIT, WHAT!?!?!?! We are already drowning in paperwork, but now we have a ‘report card’?!?! Up until today, at each report card reporting time, we wrote progress reports on how each student was doing on each of their individual goals and sent that home for parents. Which leads to endless email exchanges, and further meetings with parents, but I do feel that parents have the right to progress reporting and not just annually at the IEP. Even when it leads to a ton more work!

Now we have a one-size fits all elementary report card for special ed students. Now ponder that for a minute. The parents of kindergarten students will get the same report card as parents of a 5th grader! Gen Ed has a report card for each grade level, but we’re only going to have one, and we’re going to send them home 3 times a year!! And students who are less academically able will be sharing report cards with students who are working somewhat closer to grade level work. Little Johnny who just learned how to hold a marker and trace a straight line in the 3rd grade will be bringing home a report card that grades him on writing a 5 sentence paragraph. That sounds helpful and supportive for parents?!?!

I seriously can’t wrap my brain around this! There are so many unanswered questions. Oh, and we could have had a conversation about this, at least had the opportunity to ask the questions just a few days ago, but instead we sat around and talked about writing legally defensible IEP goals, and implementing curriculum while incorporating IEP goals, and yadda yadda yadda!

My brain hurts and they only cure for that WINE! Lots of WINE!!