Sep 10

New kid in class, came from the district next door (which is in another state), nobody tells anyone until the fourth week of school that he can't read. How often does this happen? And oh yes, he also has been labeled with emotional/behavioral disabilities. So we don't know what to expect. He was placed in our class quite abruptly last week, and now the special education teacher tells me she's still waiting for his move-in conference.

This happens so often, and teachers are left trying to do something. The child ends up placed in a "holding pattern." These are so often students who really need the consistency, who are moving schools, and now they're being bumped around to different classes and different teachers until someone figures out what to do. We can't (we do, but we shouldn't) really blame the administration, because they always have a bunch of these to take care of. Many times schools don't really know who they have until the first day or later. How can we make time for even informal move-in conferences? Since this particular student has emotional / behavioral issues, do we wait until something serious comes up? (which it clearly could any time).

This student shows the kind of reading level I expected in many of our lower students in this class, although we didn't see it. I would guess he's around the beginning of second grade, but we'll see. He might be lower. The materials we had on hand were not low enough, and now we're scrambling to figure out what to do about reading groups. After test results are in we're going to gain some students and lose others. This was an online test that's supposed to predict how well students are going to do in sixth grade. Some of our students actually passed! Of course, that means they're not supposed to be in our class.