Setting A Child Straight – Part 1
Categories: Léo’s Insights 2024-2025
Once upon a time, all student records were paper. Thankfully that is now in the past. EU had many filling cabinets full of documents no one ever read or asked for. When a student left our school for another, we obligingly packaged up all the student’s records and sent them to the new school, which likely filed the documents in a new filing cabinet without ever reading the material either. Similarly, if a student came to us from another school, we had to inform the former school of the child’s enrolment with us and request the student’s records be transferred to us. We then filed them in our cabinets, usually also without looking at the contents.
(As an aside, all records generated by our school were digital from the onset of Education Unlimited in 1999. The only paper records we had were obtained from former schools and we were quick to digitize them. Digitization was mandated by the government in 2019, a full twenty years after we had implemented this technology!)
Student records were usually reasonable, containing a few dozen pages, but occasionally we would get a package of records so big it would cost the former school nearly $50 in postage. One such package contained over three hundred pages including endless test results for nearly every possible issue. My heart broke when I saw this. What were schools doing to this child? My cynicism wants to say “cashing him in.”
Students are usually funded at a base rate, with increased allotments for special needs. All that has to happen to increase the funding level for a child is to declare or generate some special needs requirement and presto, more money. To demonstrate how easy it is to take advantage of this funding arrangement, one need only see how many fully bilingual immigrants are placed in English as a Second Language programs they never see or attend, despite the receipt of extra funding. This is abuse of process.
In any case, we were wondering what this particular child was actually like, as his records made him out to be a complete basket-case freak. Once we met him we got a very clear picture of who he was and what had happened to him as a consequence of his “special needs”.
The interim moral here is: never assume things are as presented. People can and often do take advantage of others when money is involved.
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