Moved my 5 YO to a Regular K Class

United States
December 8, 2010 9:28am CST
When my son first started kindergarden, his IEP called for a 'substantially separate' classroom... So his classroom had only 10 kids, including him. Theory being that fewer kids would equal more one-on-one attention...My son is extremely easily distracted and needs to be in a model environment... After two months of volunteering in his classroom and seeing what goes on there, we decided that he needed to be somewhere else. The problem was, in this classroom, there are kids with severe behavioral issues, which impacts their learning. For some reason, this school doesn't have a resource room for these kids...so they are lumped into the classrooms with everyone else. The problem with this is that the teachers are so busy trying to control these kids, that they are not focusing on anyone else and not teaching any other students! It was bad! I'm not talking 5YO bratty behaviour; I'm talking about spitting, punching, pushing, cussing, breaking things, throwing things, screaming... it's REALLY bad... Anyway, I didn't want my son in there so I called a meeting and had them rewrite the IEP. Now he's in a regular inclusion K class, with 23 students. My thinking was to put him in a POSITIVE modeling environment; let the good students show him how to be a good student. Let the distractions be well behaving typical 5 YO chaos. Let the teacher be in control, not the little boy who is throwing blocks. The teachers, while understanding and seeing my point, thought it would be too hard for my son to focus. I said, "he needs to be TAUGHT how to be in school, how to sit and focus, how to get his mind set to learning. Let him see the model students doing that and he will follow suit." Not to mention, I'm old-school; I believe something learned easily is not really learned. A hard earned B or C is much more to be proud of than an easy A. What do you think?
1 response
@dorannmwin (36392)
• United States
10 Dec 10
In our school district, the vast majority of children that are on an IEP are in inclusion classrooms. The main exception to this is students that are profoundly retarded. That said, I think that since you seem to mostly be dealing with behavioral issues, the best thing that you can do is to have your son in an inclusion classroom. I believe that in the long run the impact of the other children in his class will teach him how to behave the way that the other children behave. Besides that, he has better opportunities to make friends.
• United States
11 Dec 10
Good morning, thank you for the response. Yes, my thiking exactly... After the holiday break, they will be doing his formal 3 year testing to determine if the move was the right thing to do... but even if they say he's struggling, I still think this is the right thing... Even if he needs to repeat K, that's okay too... I just want to see his easily influenced little mind to be impacted by nice children, not little monsters!