Week 5: Assignment B: Going to School

Week 5: Assignment B: Going to School 

This week’s assignment was to watch the documentary “Going to School”.  It was connected to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) which was originally passed in 1975. It has since been updated to include a few other components and that was done in 2004. AS I began to watch the documentary, I found that I was not fully aware of the law and had to do a little more research to learn about what It covered and how it helps students today. This video I came across (https://youtu.be/3XMndYNEGFA) is a very short video that highlights the main components of the law and how it affects all students with special needs, today. At the end of “Going to School” the video highlights the fact that many parents of students with special needs do not know their right, which ends up leading to situations that negatively affect their children. This made me think a lot about DelSesto and the ways in which I.E.P.s are handled at the school. The school district in the documentary is not much different from DelSesto, especially when it highlighted the fact that many parents are not native speakers and are unaware of the processes of an I.E.P. Richard Martinez’s mom, from the documentary, took it upon herself to be her child’s advocate and did things such as quit work to volunteer to be her child’s aid. From there, she began to help other parents around the community facing a similar situation as hers. What if there isn’t a parent at a school district like her? Who do the parents of students with special needs go to at DelSesto? Why are there not more programs to help inform parents of what the I.E.P. process is? These are just some questions I was trying to better understand throughout the video and they only left me frustrated.

Another thing the video showed that bothered me were some of the comments that were made by a few able-bodied individuals in the documentary. One was by a student in the same classroom as one of the highlighted students with special needs and he said something along the lines of “Otherwise we’d just be disgusted by their sight and it’s not right when people do that” in regard to how he felt about integrated classrooms. While I do think that the goal of that student was to highlight how important it was to have integrated classrooms, I thought the way in which he expressed that was inappropriate and almost a little rude. Who’s to say anyone would be disgusted? Guess that just rubbed me the wrong way. I did notice however, that there was a push to show the benefits of an integrated classroom using the context of socialization. While socialization for any child is important, why were they not discussing the educational factor more? The individuals who continued to push the concept that students should be integrated were the parents of the students with special needs. What can we do as a society to make integration more about the learning than just about the socialization?