Teacher suspended for letting class vote out autistic boy

Angel Heart

Conservative Hippie
Jul 6, 2007
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Portland, Oregon
Teacher suspended for letting class vote out autistic boy

Teacher suspended for letting class vote out autistic boy
Mother now homeschooling son, claims instructor violated his civil rights

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Posted: November 20, 2008
1:10 am Eastern

© 2008 WorldNetDaily

A Florida kindergarten teacher was suspended for polling her students on whether an autistic boy should remain in class.

Alex Barton, 5, lost the vote 14 to 2.

Barton, a former student at Morningside Elementary School in Port St. Lucie, Fla., had received two discipline referrals to the principal's office May 21, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported. The school was aware that Barton was in the process of being tested for Asperger's Syndrome.

This week, the St. Lucie County School Board voted unanimously to suspend his tenured teacher, Wendy Portillo, for one year without pay. Superintendent of Schools Michael Lannon recommended discipline after Portillo took Barton to the front of the class and asked students to tell the boy what they didn't like about his behavior and how it impacted them.

Barton said the teacher allowed his classmates to call him "disgusting" and "annoying."

The teacher then asked her students to vote on whether Barton would be allowed to stay. When Barton lost the vote, he was instructed to spend the rest of the day in the nurse's office.

According to a police report, "Portillo said she did this as she felt that if (Alex) heard from his classmates how his behavior affected them that it would make a bigger difference to him, rather than just hearing it from adults."

But Lannon said Portillo's actions "caused community and, in fact, worldwide outrage and condemnation." He said her attempt to influence a 5-year-old's behavior by subjecting him to the scrutiny of his peers was "fatally flawed" and violated professional ethics.


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Here's the teacher:

wendy_portillo.png

portillo.jpg
 
why shouldnt he be aware that you are judged by your behavior? that you cannot disrupt the family or community in a destructive manner...who speaks for the kids who are being cheated by this one child? was there a teacher's aid in the classroom for this child? what was this class ratio...of teacher to child...do you realize how much attention one child like this takes away from the class? why are yall acting like this teacher is to be condemned....dont we all judge and vote on our peer group daily? who we go to lunch with...who we dont ask for drinks etc? why are we going to shield kids from the reality of life? emotional abuse is telling the brats that life is fair and just and easy...bullshit...tell them the truth...we are dealing we a generation already that has been pampered to death....let us take this 8 yr old who may have killed his father and the boarder....o now everyone is singing the blues...cause there was no adult there when the kid was questioned...well guess what...if he hadnt shot his dad..there would have been an adult there...i see the kid is gonna be allowed to spend the holidays with his mom...i wonder how well she will sleep?
 
As a teacher, she should have made the call herself without involving the kids. I'm glad the school took appropriate actions against the teacher.
 
strollingbones wrote:
why shouldnt he be aware that you are judged by your behavior? that you cannot disrupt the family or community in a destructive manner...who speaks for the kids who are being cheated by this one child? was there a teacher's aid in the classroom for this child? what was this class ratio...of teacher to child...do you realize how much attention one child like this takes away from the class? why are yall acting like this teacher is to be condemned....dont we all judge and vote on our peer group daily? who we go to lunch with...who we dont ask for drinks etc? why are we going to shield kids from the reality of life? emotional abuse is telling the brats that life is fair and just and easy...bullshit...tell them the truth...we are dealing we a generation already that has been pampered to death....let us take this 8 yr old who may have killed his father and the boarder....o now everyone is singing the blues...cause there was no adult there when the kid was questioned...well guess what...if he hadnt shot his dad..there would have been an adult there...i see the kid is gonna be allowed to spend the holidays with his mom...i wonder how well she will sleep?

As a Special Education teacher, I totally understand what you are saying here, Strollingbones. We teachers talk DAILY about the impact students with special needs, emotional needs, discipline needs have on the majority of the student body.

I agree with your questions - where was this student's paraprofessional or TSS? Where was the assistance this teacher so obviously needed in the classroom?

But I also know the reality of the Special Education system. Sometimes, there isn't enough money for an individual aide, so schools try to go without. Sometimes, parents do not want their children saddled with the "stigma" of an adult following them around all day, so students who need aides do not have them. Sometimes, the procedures used to acquire a paraprofessional take months of data collection, meetings to plan those arrangements take weeks...and sometimes things just slip through the cracks.

HOWEVER...a teacher does NOT have the right to humiliate a young child in front of his/her peers. She does NOT have the right to hold that child up for scorn and derision and ENCOURAGE students to mock and tease that child.

That isn't an education...that is abuse.

As a teacher - I can tell you that this woman SHOULD have been calling the child's IEP team together MUCH sooner to discuss the behavioral challenges she was seeing in the classroom. A behavior plan to deal with this behaviors SHOULD have been in place and documentation as to its effectiveness SHOULD have been done. The team should have been working together frequently to determine if a paraprofessional was needed, if a new behavior plan was needed, if the child was in the wrong placement and needed a most specialized classroom...etc.

What should NOT have happened was Survivor: Kindergarten.

This teacher should be fired. A tenured educator should know better - and this sort of vigilante, "it makes me feel good to let all the little kids pick on the brat who's been driving me nuts for months" behavior makes ALL teachers look unprofessional.
 
Barton to the front of the class and asked students to tell the boy what they didn't like about his behavior and how it impacted them.

Barton said the teacher allowed his classmates to call him "disgusting" and "annoying."

you see this as mocking? people have real thin skins then...

mainstreaming was a bad idea when they came up with it...and hasnt gotten any better...pretty soon you will have no teachers...no one can function under the conditions many teachers are being ask to function under.

and while i am on my damned rant....why is everyone labeling kids with illnesses and drugging them....i know a lot of kids do have problems but the labeling has just gotten outta hand..fancy ass names when a lot of times the kid is nothng but a brat who needs a good ass smacking...but too many parents want to be "friends" to their kids..well guess what...you aint their friends..and it is a good thing for a kid to be afraid of their parents...
 
He was in kindergarten, strollingbones!!! We're not talking about a full-grown man who isn't doing his job.

Perfectly normal kindergarteners break into hysterical sobs when you tell them they colored outside the lines - but you think its ok to have a child with a severe developmental disorder be forced to listen to his peers call him disgusting?

I think your rant has gone a bit overboard, here.

There were other, better, more professional, and legal ways for this teacher to handle this situation. Ways that would have helped the situation - taught the kid some control and how to interact with his peers and in a classroom setting...or ways that would have demonstrated that he shouldn't be there in the first place. Time-consuming, yes...but CORRECT. Just because it made her (and you, apparently) feel good for a little bit - striking out at one child because of her/your anger at the inclusion model - doesn't mean its right.

Humiliating a child in front of his peers is not education. Sorry.
 
The 'teacher' needs to be fired and have her teaching certs pulled. I hope the mom follows through with the lawsuit.

I would agree that the teacher ought to be disciplined... but I think termination is a bit much.

From my POV, it's just as wrong to ask a bunch of 5 year-olds to normalize a peer as it is to ask them to discipline him. Special needs kids need to be in special education programs, not "mainstreamed" to the detriment of the other kids.

If this one child is habitually disruptive... then SEVENTEEN other children are paying the price for it. That's not fair. And one imagines that in particularly difficult cases, a regular classroom teacher, who isn't specifically trained to deal with disability, can make mistakes.

The link has a picture of the little boy in question... and he's a really cute kid. My heart goes out to him. But I bet those other 17 are pretty cute kids too. They shouldn't have their first taste of the schoolroom marred by constant upheaval and they shouldn't be asked to either discipline or train special needs students.
 
and while i am on my damned rant....why is everyone labeling kids with illnesses and drugging them....i know a lot of kids do have problems but the labeling has just gotten outta hand..fancy ass names when a lot of times the kid is nothng but a brat who needs a good ass smacking...but too many parents want to be "friends" to their kids..well guess what...you aint their friends..and it is a good thing for a kid to be afraid of their parents...

do you have children strolling?

what good does a child being fearful of their parents do? That doesn't teach them anything. They need to be taught self-disipline and self-control so that when their parents aren't around they make the right decisions and that doesn't come from fear. It comes from consequences for their actions.

My daughter is 14 and I can count on two fingers the number of times she's been spanked and both were when she was small and in reaction to her putting herself in mortal danger and it was more a gut reaction than anything else.

When she was 5 or 6 she stole a pack of film (for a type of camera we didn't even have which was kind of funny in hindsight) from the grocery store and instead of spanking her I took her back to the store and made her go up to the manager and tell him she stole his film. It's a lesson she hasn't forgotten.

Society doesn't hand out "ass smackins" bones. Kids need to know their actions have direct consequences, such as confinement and/or loss of privileges. Grounding to her room and taking away her television works wonders. and as she gets older other privileges will be taken away, such as driving and going out with friends.

My daughter is one of the most well behaved of her friends because she knows when I say something I mean it and there is no negotiating. I set my expectations for her early and they haven't changed as she's gotten older: do good in school, don't be disrespectful and don't lie or steal and don't treat others like shit. She's a straight A student and has never been disiplined at school. She'll have the freedom to make her mistakes but she'll know whatever her choices, she'll have to live with those choices.

this boy isn't behaving the way he does on purpose. If he could change his bahavior I'm sure he would. It's an actual disorder and for this teacher to humiliate him that way is disgusting. I agree with those who said she should be fired.
 
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Murf76 Wrote:
From my POV, it's just as wrong to ask a bunch of 5 year-olds to normalize a peer as it is to ask them to discipline him. Special needs kids need to be in special education programs, not "mainstreamed" to the detriment of the other kids.

I agree and disagree with your statement. I agree that it is completely wrong to ask kids to "normalize" a peer. If done properly, however, inclusion should never do that. What it should do it place a child, who is capable of experiencing success in a regular education environment, in that setting with the adaptations and modifications necessary to make that student a successful and participating member of that classroom.

In that scenario, inclusion has been demonstrated time and time again to be beneficial for both the special needs student AND the regular education students they interact with.

The problem is, that schools are over-run with more identified kids then they know what to do with - so they stick them in reg. ed. classrooms without proper adaptations...problems occur and the kids with IEPs have to be treated differently...which causes problems and puts the other children at a disadvantage.

OR...parents push for students who should not be in a reg. ed. classroom to be there because they want/wish their kids could be "normal" and feel that forcing them into a "normal" classroom is the way to do that. Unfortunately, our educational laws side with the parents in these cases far more than with the schools (or with the other 17-30 children in the class).

There is a way to do it and do it well....unfortunately, a lot of schools just aren't able to do it that way.
 
This entire situation is why teachers should be trained in behavior modification before they graduate from college. Not only for the student with disabilities, but the students who also have issues in the classroom. I had to take a class because it was a requirement for special ed teachers, and I still use a lot of those strategies today in the classroom.

As someone else said on here, inclusion doesn't work for ALL special needs kids. I teach in a self contained classroom, and those students are learning and growing in that environment.


What that teacher did was wrong and heartbreaking for the child.
 
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This entire situation is why teachers should be trained in behavior modification before they graduate from college. Not only for the student with disabilities, but the students who also have issues in the classroom. I had to take a class because it was a requirement for special ed teachers, and I still use a lot of those strategies today in the classroom.

As someone else said on here, inclusion doesn't work for ALL special needs kids. I teach in a self contained classroom, and those students are learning and growing in that environment.


What that teacher did was wrong and heartbreaking for the child.

are we now going back to bf skinner????????
 
are we now going back to bf skinner????????

Uh yeah, if you were trained in the 60's lol.


No dear, there are many ways you can use behavior modification in the classroom that is effective for the child. It takes the place of over medicating those kids. Didn't you say our youth were too drugged out?

Also, a lot of the kids when they come to me felt "dumb" because they couldn't do the work in the general ed. classroom. I make them feel smart, and they know I honestly care for them. Right there goes a LONG way in wanting to behave in the classroom.

I use all kinds of methods in the classroom, and it works.
 
skinner was the 70s sweetie....well i guess his hayday was the 70s...much of his experiments were truly the 60s...i think terminating the teacher is too much....does she has some history of this..actually in an odd way ..isnt this skinner...the child is being given very negative reinforcement....but the point was to learn a consequence from behavior...how more skinner can that be?
 
skinner was the 70s sweetie....well i guess his hayday was the 70s...much of his experiments were truly the 60s...i think terminating the teacher is too much....does she has some history of this..actually in an odd way ..isnt this skinner...the child is being given very negative reinforcement....but the point was to learn a consequence from behavior...how more skinner can that be?


Here, this will give you some info on mr. skinner...Love the line:

The story that Skinner raised his own daughter in a box is untrue.



B.F. Skinner: Biography from Answers.com
 
i think terminating the teacher is too much....does she has some history of this..actually in an odd way ..isnt this skinner...the child is being given very negative reinforcement....but the point was to learn a consequence from behavior...how more skinner can that be?

One mistake like this is one mistake too many. Even if it's the first time she's shown this kind of cruelty it doesn't matter. The truth is she's probably been doing things like this for years in a more subtle way and this is the first time she got caught.

and he wasn't learning a consequence from behavior at all. A consequence is being removed from the group for a short time and then being brought back and then removing him everytime after until he connects that his behavior is a direct catalyst for his removal. Consequences are him not being able to participate in the fun stuff if he can't behave during the not so fun stuff.

Any person with an ounce of compassion and decency wouldn't trot a 5 or 6 year old child to the front of the room and encourage other children to say bad things about him. It's damaging not only to the child in question but also to the children who are being asked to make the comments. It's teaching them intolerance and cruelty for their fellow human beings. And then for her to have them vote on whether to keep him or remove him? People in general don't have that kind of power in society. You don't get a crappy neighbor and do a neighborhood meeting and vote them off the block. You learn to deal with people who annoy you... it's a fact of life. People are annoying sometimes.
 

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