Some of the school staffers who work daily with schoolchildren with the greatest needs, the severely disabled, have little of no training on those students’ special needs. Georgia doesn’t require any.
That lack of training, say advocates and state officials, leads to situations ripe for the kind of abuse alleged to have been committed two Atlanta Public Schools paraprofessionals who were caught on a videotape made by a worried teacher.
What training does take place typically is left up to individual school districts, and most don’t do enough, say advocates for children with disabilities.
Atlanta Public Schools could not say whether the two caught on the tape received the training they were supposed to get, in “instructional strategies for students, assistance with their duties and responsibilities as far as feeding some students with more significant needs, toileting, those types of things, and behavior support.”
Abuse of such students is “a very serious problem,” the leader of a national advocacy group for the disabled says. “These people are not trained. They don’t have a sufficient number of aides. They’re probably in classrooms that are too large. And given kids with some very difficult behavior problems. And it’s a recipe for disaster.”
Read the full story at MyAJC.com.
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