Autistic Boy Voted Out

Language warning.
This pisses me off to no end.

PORT ST. LUCIE – Melissa Barton said she is considering legal action after her son’s kindergarten teacher led his classmates to vote him out of class.
After each classmate was allowed to say what they didn’t like about Barton’s 5-year-old son, Alex, his Morningside Elementary teacher Wendy Portillo said they were going to take a vote, Barton said.
By a 14 to 2 margin, the students voted Alex — who is in the process of being diagnosed with autism — out of the class.

If a teacher did this to one of my children I would have to be physically restrained for a bit. For those of you who don’t know K2, our boy, has some developmental issues. He’s the same age as this young man. It’s a bit early for them to diagnose autism/Asperger’s unless it’s really pronounced, but even if the child was completely “normal” WTF that means it would be unacceptable.

Alex has had disciplinary issues because of his disability, Barton said. After the family moved into the area and Alex and his sibling arrived at the school in January, Alex spent much of the time in the principal’s office, she said.

K2 has been hitting recently and as such has spent his own turns in the office. This makes me glad that we’ve decided to homeshool him. We don’t want to remove him from society. He’ll still interact with other kids his age in the homeschool group, at church, and on playdates. It’s just that no public school teacher would be able to handle him appropriately with 25 other screaming meemies vying for their attention.

Thursday night, his mother heard him saying “I’m not special” over and over.
Barton said Alex is reliving the incident.
The other students said he was “disgusting” and “annoying,” Barton said.
“He was incredibly upset,” Barton said. “The only friend he has ever made in his life was forced to do this.”

Fucking criminal.

  • http://sidfaiwu.com/blog sidfaiwu

    Oh, sorry pinakidion. I forgot different states fund schools differently. I’m so used to OH’s public school system since that was where I was educated. salguod explained them quite well.
    What I was complaining about is that the public is typically the one that under-funds schools by voting against levies (or their equivalents) and then complain about the consequences. I’m not sure if the story is one of these consequences, but I would bet that it mostly is.
    salguod: OH still hasn’t resolved that issue with the State Supreme Court?!? That ruling was made at least five years ago! It almost seems too late. OH is hemorrhaging brain power faster than almost every other state. Soon, there will be no one left who values education any more. Based on the voting patterns of the state in recent years, I’m glad to be part of that brain drain.

  • http://pinakidion.org pinakidion

    Ah, now I understand the levy.
    Here, the state mandates that local property tax cannot be higher than $1.05 per $100 of value, unless you live in a learning community, then it is $1.10 per $100.
    Locally, 95% of local revenue goes to the learning community – a collection of 12 local school districts. The Learning community then redistributes that money to the various districts.
    On a state level, a 38 page mathematical formula is used to divy up funds to all school districts in the state. Most of the state money goes to disabilities and ESL programs within a district.
    As such, no one ever asks for an increase of the levy, the school districts simple change the levy year to year.

  • http://lyndonology.blogspot.com/ Lyndon

    I remember reading this a few days ago and wondering how a teacher could do that to a student.
    You think she would have talked to the parents first, instead of doing something so mean and damaging to the child.

  • http://www.thejadedvisalian.com Jen Avila

    That poor child!!
    This whole situation makes me want to go into a violent rage against the teacher. Good thing she is far away. ;)

  • Scott

    Six commenters on one post? Be still my bleedin’ liberal heart.
    Why does funding schools have to be so difficult? I mean take the red light cameras or the lotto in our state (please, take them). Proceeds from both were supposed to go to education. Only the red light camera monitoring was so expensive that it never paid off and they did some voodoo with the lotto and no actual extra money is going to the schools. I hate to go all cliche (okay not really) but WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?
    That almost makes me madder than this stupid “reality tv” approach to this particular problem.

  • salguod

    sid – Nope. No resolution. The legislature simply gave up and the courts seem to have let them. There has been no news on it for 2-3 years. Oh, and I think the original ruling was more than 5-6 years ago.
    Kinda enlightening on the value of a constitution and a supreme court. Basically, the state constitution and the court is meaningless if the legislature is unified in opposing them. The people are powerless to enforce the law. Pretty scary if you let yourself think that one through.
    My thought was to start fining every legislator $1,000 a day for each day that the funding is unresolved. I bet it gets fixed pretty quickly. I’m guessing the court has no authority to enforce it’s own edicts or else they would have. I suppose they might also say that no property taxes may be used for schools until the system is fixed. That might get the people up in arms too.
    Pink – the situation is that you choose how you want to pay for your school. Either you pay buy where you live in higher property taxes and higher home prices, or you pay in terms of tuition to a private school. Some choose to do both since the ‘nicer’ areas tend to have better schools.

  • http://darwen.us/southcon/ Darrell

    I’m totally with you on this. Any teacher who treats a classroom like an episode of Survivor has no business in a classroom. Our education system is piss-poor. No Child Left Educated has made things worse, and things like this are totally beyond the pale.

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