Reply #116: I am sorry if you thought that I was implying that YOU said parents were

[PA Democrat]

selfish. It was another poster who used that term.

You sound like a responsible and caring teacher.

My frustration with the whole issue of inclusion, is that there is a sizable group of people who seize upon the cases where inclusion fails, to justify segregated settings as the rule.

My child was doing beautifully with partial inclusion, and last year my district made the decision to implement full inclusion for ALL special education students. I found out by doing some digging that the reason they did this was that they needed the classroom space, and figured that eliminating learning support classrooms was the quickest and cheapest way to accomplish this.

I expressed my concerns that full inclusion for my child could result in a reemergence of problem behaviors that had been virtually eliminated. My concerns were well-founded. The district had done little to nothing to train regular ed teachers and there is frustration on all sides. The district's first response when the very problems I predicted came to fruition, was to suggest sending my child out of the school district to a segregated school for students with profound disabilities. This for a child with an above average IQ, who had made remarkable progress both socially and behaviorally when she had an appropriate program.

I guess all of the sleepless nights I have had as of late worrying about my child's future makes me a little impatient with blame the parent stories.