What to do when the Teacher AND Teacher's Aide BULLY your Autistic Child? A Father's Solution
5:16 am - 04/24/2012A Cherry Hill father was so concerned about the way his son was treated and acting at school, he decided to put a wire on him to see what happened in the classroom and what he found, is pretty shocking.
Stuart Chay-Fezt says his 10-year-old who has autism has always been a very gentle, loving boy. So when he started getting reports from school that his son was hitting teachers, he knew something was wrong after putting a recorder in his pocket for a day.
What he heard was so outrageous it prompted him to make a 17 minute you tube video.
Chey-Fezt says he hopes this video will lead to legislative action for zero tolerance to his type of behavior from educators.
Meanwhile he says his son Akain is in a new school environment and doing really well.
Source 1 & YT
So the father calls for 1. A public apology from both the teacher (still working in the school system) & the teacher's aide (one who is fired and the other who is also still working in the school system) 2. Legislative changes for a teacher to be fired/reprimanded if he/she was to be found to be bullying a student (actually found in the description video at the linked petition)
For more disturbing information AND TRANSCRIPTS visit where the father has written out most of what is included in the video: http://www.hnva.net/teacherbully/
I hope every one of those "educators" gets fired, not just ~moved to another district~, which resolves nothing. The fact that he only caught this because he a wire on his child makes me really fucking curious how often this kind of abuse happens beneath the parents' noses.
I'm happy this is getting so much coverage. I've known Stu for a few years now. He's a great dad!
I'm particularly pissed because:
a. My parents are both special-ed teachers so I know how many rules these women are just pissing over
b. I know this district and how ~amazing~ it's supposed to be
(and how it also has a reputation for trying to get rid of their special-ed students so that they don't bring down their test scores)Striking this out because I'm thinking of the wrong district.c. but mostly because I'M A FUCKING HUMAN BEING WITH EMPATHY.
Akain is lucky to have such a great dad, though.
Edited at 2012-04-24 11:22 pm (UTC)
This seriously makes me cry. I feel so bad for Akian.
When we were kids, we went to the same baby sitters and daycare. One of them as a total psycho, we were there for less than a month. My sister would come home and cry at dinner and generally lash out... things that she hadn't done before. Between my parents and I, we noticed that she had bruises on her back and legs. My dad went in there like a God damn papa bear and asked this sitter (we went to her house with a bunch of other kids) straight up if she had been hitting my sister. The sitter said that Sister got into fights with the other kids and there was nothing she could do to break them up, so she would let them fight.
I've never seen my dad this angry at something. He told me to take my sister outside, and he came out a few minutes later and put on a big fucking smile for us, and told us he was going to take off work that day until he found a proper baby sitter for us. I found out a few years ago that my dad had pretty much told her that her answer was bullshit, and he got her to tell him that she had been hitting my sister because "she's a bad kid."
He reported the sitter to the city, and she got shut down. It took a few years, but a few more families came up and she eventually got community service for a few months and isn't able to be around kids.
Stories like this make me want to fucking rage. I couldn't watch all of it. It happens so much more often than people think... having a child with autism is hard enough, but learning that they're being mistreated at school make you feel empty inside. A lot of these kids are totally mistreated at home, too, and it makes me want to literally hurt the "teachers" who do this sort of shit.
He just wanted to be assured he'd see his dad again. Fuck them all for saying no and taking glee in his pain, and in reporting him as a problem child when THEY. ARE. THE PROBLEM!
i want to be this amazing as a parent. i will work on it every day.
"No."
WTF. I would imagine that this is such a normal fear for children of divorced parents to have, especially if they favor one parent over the other. It takes a special kind of evil to do that to any child, but to a child that they should know is likely to be more fragile than one without autism? That's downright monstrous.
I really have to applaud him for not marching over to the school and busting some heads. I don't think I would have been able to take it.
This guy is amazing for taking a stand.
As for those teachers...I'm horrified, but not shocked. Teachers can be horrible bullies. I guess the only thing that really shocked me was their topics of conversation in front of students. But I guess they knew that the kids wouldn't be saying anything to their parents.
Silencing is one of the worst things you can do to a child, and that's exactly what those teachers and aides were doing. Not only when they told Akian and other children to "[s]hut your mouth," but also when they ignored the kids to talk about their own personal lives. It expressed to the children, "We don't care what you hear. We don't care what you say. To us, you're just background noise." And any child can pick that up, regardless of how they communicate.