Personal opinions and expreriences on/with SpEd?

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I'm not sure how many threads have been created about this, but I might as well create one.

My experience with special education has been.... mixed, and recently it's been trending towards the negative (if not, quite a lot towards the negative). I'm still locked up in special education because oh no, there's an aspie and he MUST need saving (if you can't tell, I'm not a big fan of SpED or any of that kind of stuff; I find it quite segregating).

My IEP requires me to go to speech class and I've been in this sh*t since 6th grade. It might have been useful back then but for some reason they want me to still be in this sh*t (excuse my English, I'm quite radical). My opinion on the speech teacher is not positive; she seems to be quick to make generalizations about the people who are forced to be in her sessions. I remember her distinctly saying that people on the spectrum had trouble with thinking etc, which pissed me off given that most of the people in my school have very little control over their own damn thinking anyway (see: metacognition). Most of the content in their is devoid of any real content; some of it may in theory be useful but I find it quite watered down. Not to mention these concepts could be taught to the entire school anyway. I've stopped attending and I got it removed. I wasn't going to be holed up in a VERY small room (with 3-4 other people, not counting the teacher) each lunch once a week being bored.

Thankfully, I've never had the awful experience of being jailed in a "special" class as I've heard with other people. Basically, you are forced into a subject that is theoretically the same in content but filled with other special needs students. I've heard these classrooms can be quite awful and stigmatizing. IMO, it's like putting all the black people in one class and the whites in another. I have been put in so-called "tutorial" classes, which are basically homeroom/study hall classes. It suffers the same issue of a wide variety of people with differing issues on the spectrum nonetheless being held up in one area.

I have however, was once approached by my speech teacher while I was eating by myself in a rather isolated area to literally go eat somewhere where there was a much larger crowd of people. Never mind that I can't stand large crowds or noise, really (or generally, I just prefer not to be there). They've sort of always had this mentality of forcing me to adept to the school standard of socializing and whatnot. I fail miserably with it.

Then there are the tests and all the same BS, which make me seriously wonder what kind of person the government thinks I am.

Overall, I really wish I were homeschooled or went to an alternative school, or literally anything but a typical education. SpEd really hasn't helped me a whole lot; I've always been a solo-learner.

I can totally understand your feelings towards how you feel you were treated in the school. But majority of that is because of the school system that you were in. There are many schools which teat kids in a better way. I personally know of one (Rebecca School) in New York. They have a completely focused curriculum with complete attention to each and every kid and making sure that the kids get a chance of all round development.

Hello.

I suppose I should start off by saying that along with being autistic I am also Deaf and hear with the assistance of a cochlear implant and a hearing aid. So most of my involvement with special education was being given an FM system and the option to do my work in a quiet room.

The FM system was a metaphorical assault on my senses, It made everything much to loud for my taste and the microphone was located on an impractical part of the device. So it always sounded like static blaring in my ears.

Being given free reign to leave class and totally ignore my peers however, that was bliss.

I'm deaf and autistic, and I attend a special residential school for deaf students where I receive support for both of my disabilities. I did go to mainstream school when I was younger, but I struggled to cope with the lack of understanding of deafness and autism from both my peers and teachers.

I was given a radio aid which is a device that a teacher wears around their neck that has a microphone. The radio aid had a wireless connection to my hearing aids and that would amplify the teacher's voice. I was also made to sit at the front. Apart from that, I received no support and was bullied by a lot of my peers and some of my teachers. Most teachers at my school had no experiences of teaching disabled students. I was threatened with phone calls home whenever I had a shutdown or a meltdown. Most of the teachers thought that they knew what was best for me and refused to acknowledge what I tried to tell them what they were doing wrong. I was not allowed to briefly leave lessons to go to the reception to change my hearing aid batteries if they ran out during class. I hear very little without my hearing aids.

My PSHE teacher stuck me at the back of the classroom for the seating plan and ignored what I said when I told her that I needed to sit at the front so that I could also lip read her. I couldn't hear anything that she said so PSHE was a great lesson to snooze in!

My experiences with special education are wonderful. I have met students and teachers (teachers of the deaf, who are deaf or non-deaf) who are very understanding and accepting. I have 24 hour support from care staff and teachers who work at my school. The teachers and care staff at my school specialise in deafness but have good understanding and knowledge of other disabilities. They know how to deal with my meltdowns, shutdowns and sensory issues too.

I now have a teaching assistant who supports students with ASDs. She has been helping me since I've moved to the school. At the moment, she is going through and teaching me how to recognise people's emotions and my own. She is also teaching me life skills and helping me to become more independent and how to overcome my shyness (which was crippling at mainstream school).

Since moving to special education, I've felt a lot happier and more confident than when I was in state school. I now belong to a group of friends and sign language has started to become my second language.

The classes are very small. A class in the secondary school will not exceed more than 10 pupils (if it does, the class is split up into smaller classes) and a class in the sixth form rarely has more than 5 students in total. The desks are arranged in a horseshoe shape so that every student can easily lip read and understand what the teachers are saying. Radio aids aren't used. Instead, each student has a device called a "group aid" which plugs into their hearing aids or cochlear implants and connects them into a wired system in the classroom. The teacher wears a microphone which is connected to the wired system so that their voice has direct input into the students' hearing devices. The group aids also have their own microphones to allow group discussions and for students to hear one another.

The school has its own audiology clinic, nurses' clinic and every teacher has batteries for hearing aids and cochlear implants if students' batteries run out. Every classroom has equipment for cleaning hearing aids etc.

Personally, in my opinion, I think that every disabled student should have the opportunity to receive the fantastic quality of support and education that I have now. I'm not the first person to have gone through what I went through before I started to receive special education and I won't be the last. It makes me feel sad to know this.

I had the opposite experience with special ed. The first school I was at had two isolation rooms they called "Time out rooms that they put students in, and the second restrained kids, a lot. I don't know if it is because I live in Western PA in essentially a redneck zone or what but it was a nightmare.