If you haven’t yet read Bryan Gwyn’s Carolina Journal Exclusive on special education teachers and the No Child Left Behind law, I highly recommend it. Raleigh News & Observer subscribers should also check out a related piece by columnist Rick Martinez, written in July after the General Assembly passed the “school calendar bill,” which put tourism ahead of students. The column details the bill’s negative impact on kids with special needs — a subject many legislators shamefully ignored. For those who can’t access the archives, here’s an excerpt of Martinez’s writings about Dr. James McKethan:
“The elimination of those five workdays pains McKethan, who oversaw special education programs in Cumberland County for more than 20 years. He traveled to Raleigh to tell legislators about the importance of workdays, but the hour allotted for public comment at the initial House Commerce Committee hearing was up well before he was able to speak. (He was unable to attend two hearings that were set weeks later with less than 24 hours notice.)
On Sunday, I contacted McKethan and asked why he is so hung up on teacher workdays, a term I considered something of an oxymoron. Instead of getting mad he told me about his son Jay. Jay died in 1993 at age 20. In many ways, his death was an occasion of mercy. From his birth, the McKethans knew their son was different. The skin on the right side of his body was so transparent that his circulatory system was clearly visible. Jay had proteus syndrome, known to most of us as elephant man’s disease. In his case, one side of his body grew much faster than the other. That was only the beginning. To stave off scoliosis, which causes curvature of the spine, a brace was embedded in Jay’s back. Later in his all-too-short life, he developed a serious liver disease.
When he died, Jay was preparing for his second go at 12th grade. Remarkable, given that he was mildly retarded and his academic career had been interrupted by eight major surgeries, including some to remove benign tumors from his brain. Jay had more determination than most kids, but McKethan credited most of his son’s academic progress to the hard work and extra time put in by his regular and special education teachers. They spent countless hours outside the classroom learning new teaching techniques and developing strategies to help Jay achieve, despite his physical and mental handicaps.
Precisely the type of work teachers can accomplish today during their non-classroom workdays. That’s why he sees any reduction in workdays as a detriment to historically low-performing student groups, such as those with physical and mental disabilities and children for whom English is a second language. “Reducing teacher workdays doesn’t reduce the need,” he told me. “The work isn’t going away. We’ll just resort to less effective and, ultimately, more costly ways to get it done.””
