A General Classroom Is Not a Therapeutic Setting

The classroom is not a therapeutic setting.

It is not a setting in which students can receive specialized medical treatment.

That should be obvious.

And there are therapeutic classrooms, and certainly we need those programs.

But the idea that a general education classroom that is normally staffed, like one teacher and 20 to 30 students, the idea that that can be a setting where students with extreme needs can be served without any additional support, I think it's just ridiculous.

And I'm seeing a lot of push from behavior therapists, from specialists, from people who are not actually educators, but advocate for students and try to come up with behavior plans and things like that.

I'm seeing a lot of push for those things to be implemented without an appropriate level of support in a general education classroom.

Like, for example, if you have a student who is eloping from the classroom, huge safety issue, right?

And a lot of times the behavior plan that they come up with says, let them go.

Let them go.

Well, as a professional who is responsible for the students in your room, in loco parentis, you cannot take responsibility for a student and let them go.

This does not make any sense, right?

You can't do both of those things at once.

You can't say, I'm going to be responsible for your child and I'm going to let your child run off and do whatever they want.

Those things just don't go together.

So I think we've got to draw some professional boundaries and say, we cannot serve students who are at a certain level of need in this setting right like if you call your doctor you call your general practitioner's office and listen to the phone tree the very first thing you're going to hear is if this is a medical emergency hang up and call 9-1-1 and i think we have to recognize that for some of our students with the most challenging behaviors they are having a medical emergency right like fleeing from the classroom and running out into traffic If an adult did that, like if a celebrity did that, that would be called a medical emergency.

Maybe that would be a euphemism for something else.

But, you know, this is an extreme level of need that we are not equipped and not staffed and not trained and not an appropriate setting for serving.

And I think we've got to insist that if students are going to be in our setting, they are not exhibiting that extreme level of need, right?

Like we're not an operating room.

We're not a behavioral health facility.

We don't restrain students.

Like students have to be safe and ready to, like if a student has a fever, right?

If they're throwing up and they have a fever, we can't just say, well, all students deserve the right to an education.

So we're not going to exclude them.

They need to be here learning even while they're puking.

Like, no, we have to have a safe environment and students have to be in a place medically where they can learn.

And that's not to say, that when we have students who are going through, you know, a long-term medical issue that they shouldn't get services.

Absolutely, they should get services.

But the idea that we can just herd every student into a gen ed classroom without support, without the resources that they need to keep everybody safe, the student and other students and the teacher, everybody, This is just untenable.

So I think we really have to watch out for things that are being pushed by non-educators, whether those are advocates, whether those are behavior specialists, whether those are therapists, whether those are healthcare providers.

Healthcare settings are the place where we need to address those issues, right?

If a student has such extreme behaviors that they can't safely be in the classroom, they need to be addressed.

Those behaviors need to be addressed outside of the school environment so that the student can be successful in the school environment.

Let me know what you think.