COMMENTARY
Do paperwork, meetings help our kids learn?
By Jan M. Young
Kailua resident and a counselor for the state Department of Education
Let us honestly confront the heartbreaking, paralyzing result of our litigious educational system.
Advertiser library photo • Aug. 29, 2001
For as long as I have worked for the state Department of Education, I have only experienced hard-working, dedicated colleagues. The teachers' parking lot fills early, from 7 a.m., and empties late, around 5 p.m. Administrators work nights, days and weekends, trying to manage their schools and tackle the reality that every empty space in their office is piled high with paperwork. They can barely attend to the paper load because their presence is required at an endless number of meetings. District leaders work equally hard trying to mediate and coordinate all the new and old directives with the hope that children will somehow benefit.
Fern School teacher Deeann Ling helps her 3rd graders with math. Threats of litigation have become a byproduct of teaching.
The problem in education, from my view, is not the lack of will to work hard and do well in this critically important task. The problem is that we are lost in a murky, unhealthy soup of litigious fear so thick that educational substance and true purpose are nearly impossible to distinguish.
The dilemma
We are cautioned to clearly maintain and differentiate the educational needs of the children from their social needs. In other words, if the child is doing well in school, even with grave social concerns identified at home, the child may not receive assistance.
That makes practical sense. The Department of Education obviously can't provide for every family's needs; the family must take responsibility. If, in a meeting, a service for a child is inadvertently suggested, the department has been held responsible for providing that service. So, despite possible benefits to the child, we must maintain boundaries and proceed judiciously to protect against bankrupting our system in litigation.
Special-education teachers and counselors document all encounters with children. We must do this in several ways, on several different forms, to be certain we are accountable; that we are doing what is prescribed; not more, not less.
While it is important to be accountable and guarantee identified children's needs are being met, one wonders, is it all necessary? At what point do onerous requirements begin to impede effective implementation of services by monopolizing teachers' and administrators' time?
The problem
One morning, I emerged from the school office just as a parade of little ones passed by on their way to the cafeteria. I paused to look at each little face, smiling in greeting. As they passed, maybe 150 students, a lump formed in my throat. If I could have openly expressed what I felt it would have sounded like a loud, sorrowful lament. It was all I could do to hold in my tears and maintain my smile as the single file of precious ones passed.
What I saw in the children's pasty, worn faces was a crisis that is tragic and mostly ignored. Through the years of experience, I have gained some insight and awareness of children. In addition, I am aware of some statistical realities. Recent reports identify Hawai'i as having the largest population of crystal methamphetamine users. Statistically, we know that one in five children lives in a home with a drug or alcohol abuser. Additionally, one in 14 boys and one in seven girls are sexually abused; one in two families are divorced; and 65 percent in my particular school participate in a free lunch program.
Many of these children experience life's harness every day. Most, with multiple TVs, also are excessively exposed to a medium that is anything but child-friendly. In a typical classroom of 20 students, 10 have experienced or are experiencing the dissolution of their families in divorce; four live with addicts and probably witness domestic violence or are victims of physical abuse; two boys and three girls have been sexually abused; more than half live in poverty; and most have digested prematurely numerous hours of media violence and sex.
As a counselor, I have been grateful for years of experience and the opportunities to gain new tools along the way. I regret that in the early years I didn't have these; regretting and wishing I could have done better.
Now, instead of skills and experiences that incorporate an eclectic approach to serving children, there is a tendency for our state to emphasize a cognitive behavior approach, an approach designed to help children manage themselves in the classroom.
This approach has merit. However, a one-size-fits-all approach may not benefit the quiet, lost children, the ones who love school because they are fed and safe, those whose abuse cloaks them in shame and silence, those students who walk pensively, undetected, past the office to pick up their lunch and make it through another day. Counselors must be armed with more than behavioral contracts and stickers to be supportive to all children.
The hope
School is a place that invites children to come and learn; we share life with our students for six hours a day. We come to know their circumstances and needs. We think of our schools as a family. We want to be a functional family. We want to ignite the creative instincts of children, to support their various learning styles. We want to identify their unique strengths and allow those strengths to be expressed. We want to support them emotionally in a way that builds resilience in spite of difficult home environments.
Those endless meetings, paperwork redundant assessments that administrators attend are for the few identified children. We want to nurture, support and teach all our children.
This desire to be a functional family is often sabotaged by the piles of requirements, tests, forms, meetings. The bureaucracy is so thickly layered; trying to do it all, know it all, and be an efficient and nurturing educator is like trying to swallow a river. The system, trying to right itself after a troubling lawsuit, is cautious; a paralysis has ensued, crippling our judgment and the need to serve our schools, one child at a time, according to their needs and circumstance, preventively, before they fail or drop out because of emotional exhaustion.
