Monsieur Pants-STILL-on-Fire
I was not sure if I was going to follow-up on the previous post, but alas, I must, as you shall see.
Basically, I wrote a “Single Dad” email, went back and forth a bit with the teacher and administrators. The teacher actually admitted to intentionally, knowingly documenting events that have not happened. Here is my final email to the Director of Special Education:
I hope you have seen this email trail, if not, I would like to bring it to your attention.
As you are aware, your physical therapist in the past has considered notes coming home to be “silly” and not worth taking seriously. Now it is the teacher.
The teacher emails me daily with some key events of Pearlsky’s day so I can know if there is a problem that needs to be addressed. Now, by his own admission, I find that he has no problem writing the note IN ADVANCE of the items he is documenting and sending it to me. Yes, he documents the future as if it has happened.
His rational, as you see below, is that “a problem from her [para] or Pearlsky’s end of things … would be extremely rare and would have been communicated to you after the fact.” Most significantly please note that problems with nursing and transportation are definitely NOT extremely rare. I guess he is saying that he will just make up stuff first, and if later it is wrong, someone will tell me? So instead of always knowing that I know what happened, now I must always wait for a potential retraction? Hence a completely meaningless note.
This is so completely absurd to be beyond laughable. It appears NONE of your staff takes sending notes home with a shred of seriousness, no one cares if I am informed of Pearlsky’s day in a truthful manner.
I resent getting notes home that document the future as if they are factual and actual occurrences.
I resent your staff not caring about honestly informing parents of what they do with / to the students.
I resent the facade being offered to me, notes obviously just for my appeasement.
On a different topic, I am fascinated that the usual two page field trip permission form with all its legalese and liability clauses and specifics about nurses and aides has been replaced by a single fairly meaningless sentence. Don’t get me wrong, I like the new one much better, just found it very very surprising.
I await your input on how I can have a clue what happens to my daughter during the school day since any notes that come home have zero credibility.
I did not get a response other than seeing that she then passed this email on to the teacher.
I can hear you now saying “Hey, Single Dad, who gives a shit? That was last week, it’s over, stop being a baby about it and move on.”
Ouch. And I thought you were my friends.
Fast forward to … today!
Pearlsky gets home everyday by 2:55. School ends at 2:45 and yes, the school is spitting distance from our house. She is always home within 10 minutes.
“Hey, Single Dad, why you emphasizing the time so much?”
Hold on, ok? Let me finish.
I am home waiting for Pearlsky, at 2:55 an email comes in with the note of the day.
Here is the email I sent to two levels of school administrators, emphasis as in original, and it says it all:
I am so done with these notes that are MY ONLY WAY OF KNOWING anything about my child. Last week’s note that was intentionally filled out previous to events claimed was outrageous, today’s is equally so.
We are waiting for Pearlsky. At 2:55 I get a note saying she left school on time, at 2:45. She is not home on time, it starts getting late, I figure something bad happened, it is only a four minute drive.
I call transportation, I call the driver’s cell phone … it would be nice to know where my daughter is. No answers. It gets to be 25 minutes past her documented time of leaving for a four minute drive.
She gets home at 3:15, about 20 minutes late for a four minute drive, and the note says “Departed on time w/ Aide.”
Funny thing, the aide and the van driver told me they left the school about 20 minutes late.
These notes are obviously canned text, or written in advance (as proven and admitted to last week). Today’s note was sent BEFORE Pearlsky left school and said she departed 10 minutes previous to the time it was written.
This is simply totally unacceptable. We now have documented, within a week’s time, two notes that are untrue and that document events that have not occurred. At least one of them was intentionally filled out that way.
I am requesting AN IMMEDIATE IEP TEAM MEETING to mandate that ACCURATE AND TRUE notes be sent home reporting on Pearlsky’s day.
I’ll let you know what happens. As if anything will.
Did I ever tell you I hate idiots?
Christ, how hard can this be? It’s not like they spend all day teaching these kids algebra, I’m sure time isn’t the issue. They really need some type of webcam system, I’m sure you can attach one to Pearlsky’s chair without much notice, apparently.
Oh fuck! This has got to be a violation of some regulation somewhere.
Geez. I’m so sorry you have to deal with this crap.
Wtf?? Do they think your a student there? I thought these people were meant to have degrees!!
Wow. This is so bad. I mean, I’m familiar with using standard texts in electronic documentation where you can change or add to it if you need to, or check off the appropriate answers (ie, “wound checked, no sign of infection”), but there’s no point signing off BEFORE YOU DO IT. I’m totally on your side here!
That’s so infuriating. Is their whole school day just an empty charade of care, respect, and competence? That’s what I’d be thinking. They may be doing everything else right on their end, but they obviously don’t respect their students enough to realize that parents might really care about what’s going on. Before Samuel could speak, I actually really valued the little notes he go from his daycare–I missed him during the day and genuinely wanted to know what he’d done, what his mood had been, whether he’d eaten the peas or tossed them on the floor. Parents care about what their children do during the day and if these people can’t even respect that, they are in the completely wrong profession. That’s before we even get to your point about the second note–that lie caused you stress and concern. AND if the notes are faked, you can’t really know that she’s even being fed and having her medication. I need to-do lists and check lists to make sure I do everything I need to during the day. How do they know if they’ve done everything? You *need* a factual report of what has happened at Pearlsky’s school every day.
This situation makes me wonder if the school can lose its license to operate, being that the administration seems to not care / possibly encourage this practice.
Secondly, why do these people still have their jobs??? What if Pearlsky is not the only child they are doing this to? Yech, the whole situation stinks…
Oh, the incompetence. Sorry you’re dealing with this.
Yeah, it’s just awful to think that her “school care team” may think that Parents do not care enough about their special children, so they do not provide enough information or even accurate information for that matter. Well, they should know better when it comes to your special one. It’s really bothersome to hear that her therapist thinks it’s silly to give you updates. What the hell? That is so important for you to know! I hate that the both of you have to deal with this. Hang in there. I hope the rest of your day is good.
This is what’s making headlines in our parts:
http://www.mercurynews.com/san-mateo-county-times/ci_19941697?IADID=Search-www.mercurynews.com-www.mercurynews.com
Unfortunately, it takes the word of a “whistle blower” to get any kind of investigation going. This kid was abused for months before the school took any allegations seriously. Now they’re reprimanding people, but it’s too little, too late.
As far as I can see, the only solution is cameras, on at all times, available for parents to view online at any time.
Seriously ridiculous!
I hate idiots of that sort too. I don’t see how you can trust anything they say they have done, really anything at all. I would not have been able to leave any of my children in such an environment.
The thing is, is there any recourse? Is there any penalty for something like this? I have found many times, that when the consequences are not dire enough, these sort of idiots continue to operate this way. If something is not done as it is supposed to be done, an apology (insincere most of the time), a shrug, and that’s it. It’s for things like not having an item ready when promised so you make a trip for nothing causing you problems, for other consequences more dire, and …nothing. So sorry, so sad, too bad. It is often said that our society is too sue happy. Well, this is a reason why. It is often the only way to make idiots take notice and change their behaviors.
The school we got E. out of by suing our district had a problem that they looked really good on paper. We were trying to show that it wasn’t an appropriate placement,and they kept saying, “Look what we have! Therapies multiple times a week! Regular ABA! Behaviorist on staff! Regular notes sent home from school, with check-offs and a place for a teacher’s note! Everything anyone recommends.” Except the untrained paras did the ABA, the behaviorist was rarely around, the notes came home checked the same thing daily with a teacher’s note maybe once a week, and the teacher in general was nice but clueless.
Only thing that got us by was documenting it all for the lawsuit.
I’m the parent of an 18-year old severely disabled son. I’ve read almost all of these posts and we too have a nightmare story regarding my son’s experience in special education. I could go on and on, but I’ll save it for my own blog as I try to go through my son’s history.
The biggest regret I have had through my son’s education experience is that when things did not feel right I continued to send him to school. I should have taken him out of school until we hashed out a decent IEP and services prior to the aide broke his femur at school. Traumatized doesn’t even begin to describe what my son went through from that injury. Thinking I’d done a better job he was sent back. He had a decent program until he aged up in to middle school. With a teacher who then began putting on preschool shows and music to these middle school students.
The summer of 2007 or 2008 the district did me a favor when the program specialist decided to really start giving me trouble over my son’s health aide. I hired an advocate and pulled my son from school. The fight was on. He’s never returned to school and his life is much better for it. I should never have sent him to the school site and I can’t get back all that he has lost being in the education system because I trusted “the professionals”.
The note aside, why the hell wouldn’t the teacher call you and tell you she would be so late? That should be standard policy. At my school, we call parents if the bus is running late — even if that means 25 phone calls. Ridiculous.
I would say that having a totally unaccounted 20 minutes in Pearlsky’s day (whose care was she under for those 20 minutes?) needs to trigger some kind of protective services investigation – if they can’t explain where she was, with who, and why, I think it’s only reasonable to assume bad intent at this point, after you’ve had multiple items of evidence already that show that her whereabouts and daily routine are not being appropriately or truthfully recorded.