Schools Say They Have To Do Better For Students With Disabilities This Fall
For Sarah McLaren, who lives in a suburb of Minneapolis, talking about the spring is painful. Her daughter, a rising fourth-grader, struggles with auditory processing and receives special education services. But McLaren says her daughter had trouble keeping up with teachers on an iPad because the instruction was almost all talk.
"They'd tell her, 'Look at this problem, look at that problem. No, show me your worksheet,' " McLaren remembers. "The teachers were doing the best they could, but all those rapid verbal directions just overwhelmed her."
McLaren says her daughter went from loving school to dreading it. "[She] would literally run away from the iPad and hide in the closet or under the bed."
More than 7 million schoolchildren receive special education services in the U.S. But this spring, when the nation's schools were forced to teach remotely, many of those children were left behind, and some vital services — including physical, occupational and speech therapies — simply stopped. With many districts planning to continue remote learning in the fall, parents and caregivers expect better this school year. And school leaders know: They've got to do better.
Special education teacher Nikki Allinson, in Washington, D.C., says one of the greatest challenges she faced trying to teach remotely was that many of her students learn with the help of tactile, classroom-based tools — like laminated cards or magnetic letters for word decoding. But, in the spring, kids weren't given those tools for use at home. Allinson says that also made it "nearly impossible" to teach abstract math concepts. "I recorded so many videos of me with Legos, you know, trying to find things that they CONTINUE READING: Can Schools Deliver Services To Students With Disabilities This Fall? : NPR