Update: Alex Barton's ex-teacher reassigned

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http://www.suntimes.com/news/nation/972423,oust052708.article


CBS Interview with Alex and his Mom.

http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video ... id=4130015




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aww!

They both are so sweet and I liked how the reporter mentioned that Alex looked safe in his mom's arms.

Shame on the teacher though

He does appear to be a perfectly sweet little boy. I think that teacher should be ashamed of herself. What she did could leave lasting scars on that little boy and could have messed up the minds of those other kids, too.

Teacher 's special needs topic

Wendy Portillo needs sensitivity training in the case of different needs children. I know I was ostracized by selected students (like Kapos) in the classroom when I was younger. The teachers allowed this because they were overburdened by class sizes of between 40-50 pupils. What easier way to police other kids than by this teacher-directed peer pressure. You cannot win. Portillo used the Survivor democratic method. She got "rid" of the "problem" and could wash her hands of it. What is worse, shunning or deportation? Both are horribly sadistic. This is unconscionable.

Whoever that child was who voted against Alex Barton's departure learned a valuable lesson in following his/her own principles and not succumbing to group-think. I hope Alex was able to vote, as there were two votes in his favour.

Autistic children need education assistants from the start of primary school. They are also an invaluable resource to train mainstream children about how to get along with different classroom peers.

I like the part where the mother is basically demanding her son's right to not get treated like s**t, and hes saying "Shes right, shes right, shes right right right. mhmm mhmm"

Hes adorable. Portillo is evil.

Macbeth wrote:

What she did was very wrong, but she is not evil and she should not be called evil.

No. Screw her. Apologising for her by saying shes wrong or misguided or needs extra training is exactly how tossers like her get to keep screwing people over. She needs firing. Now. She needs to be taken away from children, period.

She is categorically a twat of the highest order, who perceives no wrong doing in her actions. A lot of evil people have claimed the same.

Rejection like that directed by a teacher towards a 5year old, AS or not is cruel and very ignorant. No five year old should be brought to the front of the class to be ridiculed and criticized. Was she hoping to shame him into good behavior? That is not even a good angle to take on discipline. Her methods need some reevaluating to say the least.

What a cute kid too. He seemed fascinated with the clip on mic. His mom is very devoted to him too... that is a blessing.

Teaching kindergarten takes a special breed. At that age they can't be relied upon to consistently pee in the toilet, tie their own shoes or even just put the crayons back in the box in the middle of the table. To get these kids through their half day much less get any productive learning out of them takes a different approach and patience level than the older grades.

Previously, according to news reports, Ms Portillo had been teaching accelerated 3-5th graders. So she was playing out-of-position, and set up to fail.
That said, she failed spectacularly. The union may save her job for her, but she's done teaching kindergarten (and probably OK with that).

Subjecting a problem student to some unfiltered peer feedback is not really appropriate in kindergarten, but you can kind of follow the logic behind the strategy. At that point, we're at a reprimand. Her job became in jeopardy when the child left the classroom, and she didn't rush after him to pull the plug before he got all the way to the office.

Public education is not a democracy. Students don't get a vote over who attends their class in college, much less kindergarten. There are specific, legally mandated procedures for determining which child sits in which classroom, put in place to prevent just this sort of incident, and every teacher knows this.
It's hard to see how they didn't violate at least two federal laws.

No lawyer, not even a schooldistrict lawyer, lets this civil suit go to jury. They'll get waxed. In the end, Alex will attend another school at the district's expense, all the teachers will attend some sort of seminar, there will be a specific policy prohibiting this sort of peer feedback under any circumstances, and Portillo will disappear from classroom duty.

Then we all move onto the next horrifying incident, which we know is coming.
Most of us flailed about wildly in kindergarten, and suffered for it (my school mandated that I see a psychologist before returning to class.)
When my son went to kindergarten, and we had our first ISP meeting, his teacher insisted that there simply had to be some sort of medication for this.
So it goes.
The good news is that incidents like this are newsworthy now, instead of commonplace.
There may be hope for the NT's after all.