Children with disabilities

Once again I would like to say everyone did an amazing job with the law presentations on Tuesday. I was honestly surprised by how thorough they were and how much information everyone was able to fit into fifteen or twenty minutes. While listening to the presentation on children with disabilities I was reminded of many of the issues that have come up in our SPED class. It is often easy to discuss students with disabilities as if they are a specialty group somehow distanced from the rest of the world. As someone who has a brother with autism I can tell you these children are a part of our daily lives and deserve every opportunity that is given to other children. Many of us are not yet classroom teachers and I can’t speak as to how hard or easy it will be to accommodate the needs of individual students when we have a classroom of thirty. What I can say is that if it were not for the individual attention my brother received throughout school he would have never graduated from high school. That attention he received came from the constant awareness and effort my parents put into his education, but for many students that parental attentiveness is not present. For those students it is our job as educators to make sure they receive the education they deserve. IEP’s provide prescribed accommodations that we must abide by, but often a little more attention, simplified or spelled out instructions, and a few easy changes in our classroom atmosphere can make all the difference.