I'm sorry but a child reaching freshmen year with their documentation that shows they are developmentally at a third grade level for reading and writing is unteachable. I know that may be a crazy opinion but I've never seen it this bad till this year.
Half a co-taught class developmentally 6 years behind where they should be. My co-teacher is losing their mind. I'm losing my mind. We're doing stories that are 3 pages long and they forget what was 1 paragraph before. They don't know how to operate a google document. Many have lost their homework sheets in their folder less book bags.
I don't even really know the other half of my class since I have no time to talk to the students who are demonstrating the basic ability to follow a 2 step direction since I'm busy putting the fire extinguisher to other half who seemingly have never been told to do anything their entire life.
I cannot scaffold things any lower without it literally being a third grade level class. One child literally had documentation showing they don't understand that stories begin and end.
Our biggest challenge of the year so far was writing a singular scaffolded paragraph with sentence starters based off a short story. Multiple paragraphs contained characters that simply did not exist in the story.
I'm losing my brain
Oh, I totally know that. Especially special needs programs. Sure, there's a few who genuinely care and work hard and do good jobs and are criminally underappreciated, but there's a lot of burnt out ones just doing the minimum until retirement and being physically abusive out of desperation and panic, and a lot of people who take teaching jobs or educational assistant positions in special needs programs for easy access to children whose complaints are never taken at face value, making it so that the more extreme abuse they inflict, the less likely the victims will be listened to and any investigation performed.
I can't die on this special needs hill and it seems like you have experience with it. Special needs education in the state public system is a hell in and of itself.
Yep. SpEd is hell everywhere for everyone involved.
I was a student in it who was able to recognize the abuse and neglect both as what they were, and had a very rare mum who believed me. Still nothing that she could do about it because the system is inherently so shitty. Being believed by your parents is only a tiny piece of the battle for the victims. (But hey, if the abysmal academics in those hell holes didn't get me doing my own research into the stuff we were supposed to cover in Social Studies and didn't, I wouldn't have gone way further on political economy, the Cold War, and socialism, and I probably wouldn't be a Marxist-Leninist today, so I think I got out better than most, and better than what would have become of me in mainstream classrooms...)
And now my mother works for a school, in the special education system, and she comes home every day with horror stories. Of admin carelessness, her coworkers' abuses of the children, both the rare deliberate and frequent desperate, and the general shoddiness of the system. We regularly have discussions, my perspective as a former victim and hers as a rare staff member that does her best to throw admin and teachers under the bus over ever abusing a child in her care, and the thing we keep coming to, is that separated special programs don't work because they turn into underfunded overcrowded dumping grounds for every child who's at all in the way of "normal" classrooms and all the worst teachers in a given district, and integration/least restrictive environment doesn't work because there isn't funding and staffing for the necessary support and classrooms are overcrowded and there's not enough individual attention for any kid as it is.
We're not in the US, and this is in the Catholic schools, officially the "Separate School District" here, but this is a problem that seems to happen in a huge chunk of the Western world.
I come from a family of teachers that worked in low income (Title 1) schools and we had a family friend who was a LD teacher. The stories she would tell of getting beaten up by children and having absolutely no help in the classroom for 20-40 kids were harrowing.