Aide in classroom?

There are good systems and bad systems, and there are competent and helpful aides and there are incompetent and worse than useless aides.
This is not a good time to get in touch with teachers as they get dragged to all kinds of planning meetings which often make no plans but take up oodles of time.
As soon as school starts, the first or second day, you need to present yourself at the door (after class so there’s time to talk a minute or two), introduce yourself, and make arrangements to meet and work out *together* what the aide is there for. You won’t be able to meet the first couple of days while the teacher is running around trying to find the class lists, textbooks, and extension cords that have mysteriously disappeared, but you should be able to get reasonable time during the first week or at latest the second.
Two extremes to avoid: I have seen aides sitting at the back of the class cutting out the kids’ art projects. This is actively counterproductive; the aide is not helping the children with learning or language skills, the job she is paid for, and she is doing the work the kids should be doing, taking away whatever learning process (cutting with scissors) this project was supposed to teach. On the other hand, I have seen classrooms walled off with partitions and the aide set up as a separate teacher, teaching her own half of the class with essentially no supervision. This is inappropriate because the aides have absolutely no preparation or training in teaching, and usually fall back on rote memorization as the only skill they understand. They also often teach things that are not true, having limited education themselves. Also the (supposedly) qualified teacher naturally takes the higher group and leaves the lower group with the most needs to the untrained aide.
Insist that this aide is *neither* a clerical assistant *nor* an independent teacher, but is there to *assist* — not to do the child’s work for her, but not to do all the teaching either. This is one of those fine lines and will take a lot of negotiation and trial and error to get right.

I work as a sub SE aide in middle schools.

One school does inclusion aides.
Each aide has a notebook in which she keeps track of
the students she is assigned to. She can have from two
to twelve students on her list for each classroom.

During instruction time she will sit in the room and
listen to the teacher. She might redirect an ADD or ADHD
child to pay attention (or drag his desk away and park him
in a corner….)
While the students are doing their seat work she will walk
around the room seeing how the kids are doing (usually correcting
spelling, helping with a math concept). Sometimes sit with a child
and show them how to find information when filling out a work sheet.

She will not be able to do any remediation, except for the odd
‘this is a soft ‘C’ because of the /e/ or /i/ or this is a foreign word,
it is not going to follow the rules.

My son’s middle school has no inclusion classes. All aides, two if
you are lucky, stay in the resource room.

Anne

Get a notebook and start logging *every* attempt at contact. Maybe things will go fine. HOw will you know? Write a letter of concern to the principal and all the teachers. It doesn’t have to be alarmist or threatening — you just, absolutely, need to have a better system of communication, thank you. You have tried on this date, in this way, to communicate. You need to be sure she’s getting that Free Appropriate PUblic Education. Give specifics about what you need in terms of communication and feedback, and what accommodations your child needs. (The more facts and specifics, the more effective it is.) Send it certified, return receipt requested, and ask that they contact you within 48 hours of getting it to set up a time to discuss these matters, as each *day* that goes by your daughter could be getting further and further behind.

HOpefully some other folks will respond with various perspectives. You’ve touched a sensitive spot for me here and hopefully your experience will be different than mine as a teacher. I saw a few too m any students go into jr. high still with good learning habits, respect for teachers and themselves, and a generally positive feeling for their role in the school community.
The better their self-esteem, the nastier the disillusionment. Welcome to tracking, official or unofficial. LD students are the bad kids. Welcome to “you gotta learn to survive in the Real World, kid!” We won’t talk about the unstructured time and what went down in the cafeterias and bathrooms and backs of school buses.
By ninth grade, things were I hope at their worst as these kids (not all of ‘em, of course… but too many from families with parents trying their best to support htem) figured out that no, for the most part their parents dind’t find ouit what they did or didn’t do at school (so the kids who came in with the beginnings of bad habits really had a ball refining them); they weren’t going to fit in with the “good” kids anyway so they’d try so hard to fit in with the bad ones, and there are fewer sights as excruciating as watching that particular rite of passage for an LD kid who might not be the most socially astute guy, or perhaps is and is learning amazing ways to apply people skills. And not all of them survived their public school careers.

Again, your mileage may(hopefully!!!!) vary. But if you’ve got a bad gut feeling… listen to that gut.