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potentpotables t1_j14s1jz wrote

Reply to comment by georgethethirteenth in Medford school stabbing Monday injures student, leads to police presence by _Hack_The_Planet_

> These days, they're absolutely essential parts of a well-run school district.

Why is this? I'm in my late 30s and never ever had paras in my classrooms as a kid and it was fine. I know they're not paid much, but has this contributed to the rise in education costs?

I know special needs are a huge drain financially, so my guess is that the paras are just a drop in the bucket. I'm looking at this completely as an outsider with no knowledge of how school systems work.

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georgethethirteenth t1_j15g3zo wrote

Chances are that if you are in your late 30s then your school wasn't implementing an "inclusion" program - I'm similar in age and I know my school didn't.

Currently schools are instructed to place students in the "least restrictive" environment possible. What this means is that students with disabilities, that in my day would have received pull-out services, are now spending their days in mainstream academic classrooms. This has proven to be beneficial to those students (in my opinion, the literature hasn't yet proven that it doesn't impede "mainstream" students) but in practice it means that instructors are now scaffolding and modifying material to meet the needs of ESL students, learning disabled students, behaviorally challenged students, autistic students, and more all in the same classroom.

It's challenging for a single instructor to handle the multiple different needs, paces, and abilities in a classroom on their own - quite frankly it can be extraordinarily challenging for an instructor, a para, and the occasional special ed teacher to handle a classroom of twenty-five to thirty students even with three adults in the room.

This is only one small piece of the puzzle, but Inclusion programs are where the current pedagogy is and there is plenty of literature to support it (and as someone in a classroom on the daily I'll admit that I'm not sure where I fall on the topic).

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