I would like help from any teacher who might be in my same situation. I am the only resource teacher in a school with 600 children. I am now serving only identified children who number about forty. In the first four grades I pull out the children for one half hour a day and, using the Orton-Gillingham method, I am having success. My problem is grades fourth-eighth. There are sixteen classes to cover in those grades. The administration wants those grades to be mainly inclusion, but they don’t realize that to do this properly I would have to have conferences with these teachers frequently. Right now I make sure proper accommodations are in place, read test, and give some inclusion help in LA and math classes. Since some of the children are not identified until the later grades due to the labeling process, the older children do not get the remediation they need. I always suggest outside help for these children. If anyone has any ideas I would gladly appreciate it.
Re: Help
40 is far too many and K-8 is too wide a spread for one teacher. You’d do well to keep up with that many IEP’s…no way to effectively teach that many. Inclusion? What do they want you to do? Spend 10 minutes per day in each grade after you teach reading to all the K-3 kids? Tell them they need another teacher!
Janis
Re: Help
I’m sure that this doesn’t make you feel much better but there is one resource teacher for 1500 students at my son’s school. She did lots of complaining but none of it made any difference. Needless to say, we have done most of our remediation privately.
Beth
slp's have large caseloads too
many SLP’s have to cover two schools and have 60-80 kids to keep track of. I would rather make a dent in remediation than putting on band-aids because the more kids you have the harder it is to remediate, especially those with language deficits, which is what many LD kids have, deficits in language. Usually the Resource teachers have instructional assistants to help them with their large caseloads. They are allowed so many assistants per a certain number of children. In the district I work with they have changed the names of Instructional Assistants to Independence Facilitators, when I heard that it sounded like a shift in semantics but they are still doing the same stuff, helping in instruction to the special education kids.
What some schools are doing is grouping the RSP kids into collaboration classes with co-instruction done by both the regular education teacher and the Resource teacher. Is anything like that available to you at your school for the older kids?
I feel for you, I am not looking forward to juggling a ton of kids on my caseload either and I am trying to figure out a way to make it work. :?
Help
Thanks to all of you who replied. I will show these replies to my principal and hopefully she will get me some help.
Sounds like a rock and a hard place. You cannot do the job you hope to with that number and spread of students. Not to mention the testing and the IEPs.
Can you sit with an administrator and go over a “proposed” schedule so he/she can see that there are not enough hours in the day to cover all that needs covering?