Teacher tries to stay positive, fight for her students’ needs

More than one of the city’s teacher-bloggers wrote this weekend about how hard they have to work to stay positive right now. For a daughter’s geography, the bad feelings started when she spoke up for her special education students:

Things have been nasty and negative at work all week. It all started when…. I finally brought up, at a meeting, the fact that the guidance counselor has never seen any of the special needs students for their counseling sessions. She tried to say that she had but had no proof of this, nobody could back her up, and each student told me she’d never had a session with them. Some had no idea she was the guidance counselor. She even stormed into my room to imply that the students and para-educators were lying. That was two Fridays ago. Her bad energy (aka guilty conscience) spilled over into last week, the principal had gotten involved, things just weren’t right. All that on top of the enormous pressures that build up in the ELA department two months before the state exam.

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First Person is where Chalkbeat features personal essays by educators, students, parents, and others trying to improve public education. Read our submission guidelines here.