My State in a Michigan School District

Yesterday, the school I work at was on lockdown. Some kid had a gun. Lots of police. We had to stay in our classrooms with the doors locked, and keep the kids away from the windows. As soon as the buses could get there we escorted the students to the buses, then we were ordered to leave campus ourselves as soon as we could.

Guess nobody got hurt, since NOTHING was on the news, on the Internet, or in the newspaper. And nothing was said about the lockdown today at the school. Seriously, nothing. We all moved on with our lives and lesson plans—myself included.

I was anxious to dive back into our lessons for “Women’s History Month” and “National Reading Month.” I’ve been reading the book Cleopatra’s Daughter to my students, connecting it to all of the core subjects. We’re getting to a really, really good part of the book….. And then, the classroom phone rings.

I’m called down to the office like a truant student to talk to the school psychologist, my department head, and the district’s director of special education. Apparently, I fucked up.

Wide eyed and a little pissed off (I should have been teaching), I waited for it. Right before the tongue lashing began, I realized what the topic was going to be. Last week I’d had a contentious IEP meeting about one of my students. The only person in disagreement with the team recommendations was the school psychologist. She was firm in her disagreement. My student’s mother was equally disgusted by the psychologist’s reasoning.

Most of the IEP team wanted to place the student in 8th grade in my class for a second year. He was showing promising, and sudden progress since I had taken over the classroom. For the previous two years his classes had been with a substitute teacher, who was not certified as a teacher in any subject. Additionally, it was found that he was severely visually impaired enough to be considered legally blind. We were just now figuring out how to effectively teach him, and how he could show us what he knows.

The school psychologist, however, was adamant about two things. First, intelligence was a fixed quotient that she could accurately measure with a standardized test. She whipped out her diagram of the IQ Bell Curve. Pointing to the area in the middle, she said, “This is where normal people are. According to the tests he’s been given since elementary school, this is where he is,” and she pointed to the far left tail of the Bell Curve. The student’s mother visibly bristled at this definitive declaration of “Your son is here.”

The meeting concluded with the decision that these concerns would be addressed during an additional “move up” IEP to determine where the student would be placed the following school year. The school psychologist left. The ancillary staff left. The parent remained purposefully at the table waiting to talk to me. I told her that I wanted to make sure that I had her “parent concerns” accurately recorded, and I turned my laptop over to her to type these in herself. When she was done, she asked me what I thought about the psychologist’s assessment of her son.

I answered that I honestly did not agree with the psychologist’s view that her son’s abilities were predetermined and limited. She shared that she was concerned that having an unqualified teacher had impeded his progress. She asked me if I knew that the previous teacher wasn’t even a certified teacher. I told her the truth. She asked me if I thought this might have affected her son’s performance on the most recent standardized tests. I told her the truth.

A very, very, wise professor told me something I didn’t really quite get until I started teaching myself: “Every day you’re doing the right thing is a day you might get fired. If you’re doing the right thing you’ll go to work wondering if you still have a job.” Well, fuck.