Went to school in the 80’s. In 2nd grade switched from private to public school. Noticed some kids in another class in another part of the building looked a little different, but didn’t think much of it. Then one day a couple of teachers came in and reamed out our entire class for a couple of troublemakers calling those kids “retards”. That was the first time I’d ever heard the word, let alone the “concept” of mentally challenged or special or whatever the hell you’re supposed to call it.
There weren’t any special classes when I was in grammar school. Now I can look back and see who might have been LD, and who would have had help if there had been special ed classes, but there was no one on any of my classes who would have been taught in a resource room.
In high school I have no idea. No one in my classes had an aide, and if there were resource classrooms and teachers, I knew nothing about hem. It was a public high school, so I imagine there was something.
I don’t think of sped (for special education) as an insult. It’s just shorthand, and I’ve never heard it used any other way. Really, I’ve never heard it said; I’ve only seen it written.
There were special ed kids in my junior and senior high schools. I graduated in 1968. They spent part of their time in regular classes and part of their time in special classes.
The earliest time I can recollect a special education class must have been around 5th grade back in 1985. Once in a while we would see the special ed students at recess, lunch, or looking in their classroom as we walked by in the hallway.
I’m pretty sure we had kids who would have benefited from some extra attention but no such thing existed in my school days. The kids who were struggling just got put in the lowest graded class for each subject.
I remember in elementary school in the 80s that we had 3 elementaries in the district, and while the “normal” kids (me) went to school based on where they lived, the special ed kids went to whatever school had a special ed program for their grade. So it musta been like 2 grades per school. I happen to remember the teacher for special ed at my school, as she wore braces on her legs.
I don’t remember what the deal was with special ed in middle school. In high school (in the 90s) I know we had special ed classes but I don’t think those kids were relegated to the special-ed rooms full time.
In fact we had a kid in our social studies class nicknamed “Special Ed” being that his name was Ed and he had been held back a few years and was a bit slow.
As for bullies, I have no idea. I do know that Special Ed himself was a bully, being bigger and older and meaner than everyone else. I can’t really see high-schoolers picking on kids with disabilities when there were fat and ugly kids around.
We had a couple of brothers a grade or two below me who were in wheel chairs with debilitating diseases (breathing tubes, head rests, etc), and they were (and are - 20 years later) EXTREMELY popular guys.
In my own school career, I remember there being a few kids that weren’t necessarily academically impaired, but who had “emotional problems” as they were described, who were in our classes some of the time. One in particular apparently had a bone to pick with me, and I ended up in a fight with him… that he started by punching me in the face after a long string of insults, shoves and other stuff trying to get a rise out of me, and then I got in trouble for beating the shit out of the “emotionally disturbed” kid when I retaliated. He didn’t ever mess with me again though.
However, when I hit about middle school, my mother went back to work as an elementary special ed teacher, and I was much more aware of special ed in general. We still didn’t see the special ed kids often- maybe when their class was going somewhere in middle school, we saw them lined up and going from place to place, but that was about it. I went to a private college prep high school, so there weren’t any special ed students at our school.
I was in school from 1993-2005. I knew about the special ed kids in elementary school, because I was a safety patrol and sometimes helped out with them on the playground at recess. They were in their own classes and I mostly remember how they made strange noises and didn’t talk or want to interact with others (when I got older and looked back, I realized it was probably severe autism). In middle school, I knew there was a “resource room,” and in high school I knew there must have been special ed kids because I saw a handful of students with Down syndrome in the halls, but they were never in any of my classes.
All of my schooling career came after IDEA was passed. I now work in special ed. I’m embarrassed to think how little I knew of all of this when I was actually in school.
In grade school and middle school, not really. I was on the other end of the “special ed” spectrum. I got yanked out of class on a regular basis to go do special smart-kid things, some of which was total crap, and none of which got you picked on or punched less than being yanked out of class for having a learning or physical disability.
There were not a lot of physically disabled students in my high school. I think there may have been one girl with cerebral palsy, who used crutches, but it only affected her motor skills, and she was academically with everyone else. There were plenty of learning disabled kids, and I met a lot of them. The classes were semi-tracked where I was; there were advanced and/or AP options in math/physics, lab science (read: chemistry), and history/literature, but other subjects had no tracking system at all, and a couple of the untracked classes were things you were required to take before you could graduate. The instructors of those classes generally had no resources for people on either end of the bell curve, so their solution was to pull me away from the large amounts of nothing I was doing after I’d finished the worksheet and put me in charge of tutoring someone who was struggling.
I don’t recall my district mainstreaming anyone who had behavioral or mental problems severe enough to disrupt a lecture class, but I met some kids who were profoundly, disablingly dyslexic or dyscalculic. I liked most of them. The learning disabled kids tried a helluvalot harder than anyone else ever did. I’m still not entirely sure what I think of the grown-ups’ habit of putting me in charge of people my own age without notice, but I did like being a teacher, especially when it worked.
I was not aware of any students with disabilities when I went to a private Montessori school, but when I started 4th grade in public school (1998) my elementary school had a separate classroom for students with severe learning (and sometimes physical) disabilities. The elementary school I transferred to had a separate wing known as “The Center” for students with disabilities severe enough that they could not be mainstreamed and they had lunch in the same cafeteria and sometimes shared a gym class with us. There was another separated classroom specifically for students with autism.
My middle school also had something we also referred to as “The Center” although it seemed like most of the students there had mental illnesses or emotional problems. Some kids “graduated” from The Center and went to high school with the rest of us and were mainstreamed. Other kids went on to go to a high school for students who could not be mainstreamed.
I don’t think we had any at the small private school I went to K-9th (1974-1984). There were a couple I was aware of at my public high school. One girl graduated with us, she was in a wheel chair and looking back, I think she must have had CP, but she was never in any mainstream classes that I was in.
Started Catholic Schools in Grade K, 1, for sure. I started grade 1 in 1949. All the way to grade 12 and they were small schools in that the max class might have been 40-45 kids once in a while.
We had all kinds of special ed kids for all the different reasons. I only remember other kids being asshats from the 2nd grade to the 6-7th grades. First school fight was over the treatment of a special kid.
High School, no one was stupid enough to mess with them and there were few that would have even in a public school. Just was not a good thing to do back at that time in that place.
Never heard of a kid kicked out of our schools. A few tried to run away, mean nuns like you would not believe, & parents backed the teachers most of the time.
Actually, they were great teachers and I’ll be forever glad I got to have them in my life.
So for me, I was not subjected to the segregation of ability nor race in any of my schools. I was aware of it out in the other world, it just was not in my schools.
From about 170 and up, I feel that the education system has been going the wrong way. But it is what the people want so … shrug.
My father and his siblings, in the late 1930’s, attended Ann J. Kellogg Elementary School in Battle Creek (Kellogg, duh.) The student body included kids with physical and mental disabilities, which at the time was considered pretty advanced. He’s spoken about how grateful he is for the experience, and what a wonderful school it was. It changed how he has interacted with differently-abled folks all his life. He learned at a young age how NOT to be freaked out by folks who are not in the “normal” spectrum - it just removed all the “otherness.” I’m so impressed that this type of mainstreaming occurred at such an early date, and that it had such a life-long affect for him. Because of this I’ve always waved a flag for mainstreaming differently-abled students as much as possible. It’s a great opportunity to get over the “otherness” of differently-abled people, which is wonderful.
I went to school from 1989-2003, and yeah, I was very aware of special ed kids because I was one of those special ed kids during my early school years. I mean, it was a normal school, but I went to a special ed class. In short, I had/have physical and learning disabilities. Going into 3rd grade, I was moved to a different school, and put with the mainstream school population.
They made themselves known in my school, by setting off the firealarm any time they could.
If your talking down syndrome my elementary school had a classroom for them. If your talking kids in wheelchairs, blind, or deaf I didnt know any until high school.
I know now that a kid in a wheelchair couldnt have gone there anyways because the old building had stairs everywhere. Kids blind or deaf went to their own schools.
Nowadays of course those kids are mixed with the general kids which I’m thankful for.
I work with many kids like this and we are pushing more and more for there to be cameras in special ed classrooms and that those rooms not be in some corner. Why? WAY to many cases of abuse of non-verbal kids or simply special ed teachers not doing their jobs.
I went to a small, private K-12 Christian school from 1978 until I dropped out in 1986 or so. 300 students across all grades. We had special ed classes (called “Talent Development”), and they attended classes like art, music, and gym with everyone else, and were included with non-curricular things like lunch, recess, field trips, park days. TD classes were grade-agnostic, with material supposedly tailored to each student’s needs. (TD math: kids from ages 8 to 18 in one room, theoretically each working on unique material.) Once in TD, it was difficult to get out; a friend who was dealing with depression issues after I dropped out got switched to TD in high school after his grades dropped, and he was never considered for moving back to normal classes, probably since he would have to play catch-up to stay current with his grade level. He was an average kid, with a few bright spots that could have been developed (he enjoyed programming and reading above-age-level literature). He talked about having math “classes” where he got a tub of Play-Doh instead of a worksheet… which didn’t help a depressed 16-year-old kid’s self esteem. Average kid with rich parents, but it ended up setting him back pretty permanently. He became a garbage man for his father’s company after graduation.
Because of those non-core classes, as well as things like recess and lunch, we knew of and (usually cruelly) interacted with them on a daily basis. There was a wide range of severe developmental problems with most of them, often manifesting itself in physical disability, but few who’d strike me as being autistic. One who did strike me as being autistic thrived when the art teacher took him under his wing; he obsessively drew architectural plans from an early age, the art teacher noticed and worked with him one-on-one after hours, and from what I understand, he’s now a professional architect.
This was my experience, too. 4th and 5th grade, early 70s, Houston area (Deer Park). They were in a separate building on the school grounds, but put in regular PE class and lunch. Good for most of the special needs kids, but a couple of them were much bigger and rougher than any other student and were quite problematic. Looking back, I feel bad for those guys. We were all in a situation that could’ve been handled better.
By middle school, I never knew anything else about their situation.
The primary way we knew about them was that they had lunch with us. Some would get into other mainstream classes. P.E. was not one of them.