Field Placement, Site Visits, Documentary

Sadly I could not figure out how to get the wordle onto this blog post (ny print screen wasn't working for some reason), so I just posted the link here.

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This week I visited the Mulberry Street school in Lancaster and the Manheim Middle school. The Mulberry Street school is where I go every week so that was nothing out of the ordinary. The Manheim middle school was visit was awesome. The teacher was great and had a packet of information and a mini tour planned for us. She had a lot of cool programs in place in her classroom and made sure that her students were very much apart of the schools community. I could tell that she had been working there awhile due to the high quality programs and level of instruction. Once again, I saw a lot of what was talked about in chapter 6 at my field placement. To avoid repetition, I created a wordle this week including information from the chapter and experiences from both my field placement and the site visits (linked above). I also wanted to briefly mention my reaction to the documentary that we watched in class. I thought that the video did a great job pointing out the difficulties experienced by the advocates. They struggled a lot to get things to where they are today and I am sure that many of them are still struggling to improve things even farther. The most shocking part to me was the fact that many of these things happened within the last few decades. The little girl climbing up the steps of the White House almost brought me to tears.

Field Placement and Chapter 6.

Chapter 6 in the book is all about emotional and behavioral issues and disturbances. According to the book, studies show that anywhere from .5% to 30% of young children struggle from an Emotional Disturbance. The average of most studies leads us to believe that anywhere from 3-6% of children struggle with an Emotional Disturbance of some kind. To be defined as Emotionally Disturbed, a child must meet several criteria. The children at my placement all meet the criteria and have been evaluated as having an emotional or behavioral disorder. This chapter pertained a lot to what I see and the types of students that I have met in my field placement. This is because I am at a school that is specifically for children who have severe emotional and behavioral disorders, the Mulberry Street School. The book says that "students logically fall on a continuum of severity with respect to their emotional or behavioral disorder". The Mulberry Street School is on the severe end of the spectrum right before residential. Sometimes things can get pretty bad. I have seen students cry, flip out, get handcuffed and restrained. We have even had the cops called to come into our school. I have seen and heard of the students swearing, biting, scratching, and hitting the staff.

Although things can get pretty crazy at times, I still believe that most of these kids are in the right place. As far as I have seen, a lot of the students seem to be benefiting from the aid and instruction that they are receiving at this school. Our book also says that "the potential for stigma suggests that we need to be sure that the benefit to the learner from being classified as having an emotional or behavioral disorder outweighs the societal burden imposed by use of the category". I think that the Mulberry school does a great job in making sure that its students are benefiting more than they are losing from having their label. A few of them have done so well that they are soon being sent back to public school.

The book also mentions a lot about how the family and the parents impact the emotional and behavioral development of their children. I believe this to be very true based off of many of the things I have heard from my field placement teacher. One of the days that I was there, she spent a good 10 or 15 minutes going through each child’s home life with me explaining what their parents and background are like. This really helped me to understand and see why a lot of these students have many of the issues that they do.