The world of disability is full of irony and paradox. The past week’s events have been no exception. Media attention has focused on truancy in our schools, with a fair bit of righteous outrage about children and young people who don’t attend school because they are disaffected, school is not where they want to be and it doesn’t engage them, or they think there are better things they can do with their time. What shall we do is the cry? Who do we punish and how? What so we do with these kids?
I am possibly a bit naive to wish that the same level of public indignation and energy could be raised about the disabled children who are denied equal access to their local schools, despite the law. Who but their families and some activists care if they are engaged in learning or not? We are assured it would be too difficult and expensive and ‘we don’t have the resources.’ The children who are truanting also need specialist help and resources I suspect.
It all leads me to wonder how many kids the schools really do serve if thousands are truanting and others are unacceptable.
Hi Robyn
Just stumbled on your site. What a lot of marvellous information you have here.
Working as a teacher aide in special education for 13 years I know all about how kids diagnosed with a disability miss out.
One thing that concerns me at the moment is that I have been told that students ORRS funded and diagnosed with an intellectual disability (this includes autistic students) are not eligible for reader writer help in assessments and exams,
even if they have teacher aide help in the subject assessed and have a good chance of passing with someone reading or writing a bit for them. The most unfair part of it to me, is that if the intellectual disability is fairly minimal but diagnosed and another student appears to have a similar or more severe intellectual disability but it’s not diagnosed then they still can apply for reader writer help.
As a teacher aide we also get told each year that the hours have dropped because our hourly rate increment makes the student’s funding not go as far. This doesn’t seem fair for the students or us that they get less teacher aide time as we get more qualified and experienced. Our union, the NZEI has been asking for years to have our wages centrally funded like teachers or a fund just for our salaries given to schools.
This isn’t going to happen under National though is it?