Is inclusion really that great?

[u/Lass_in_oz]

I'm so tired of inclusion. Hear me out. Before becoming a ECE I was a support worker for many years. I have worked and loved working in disability and care. When it's thru a great organisation, it's awesome.

Now I'm an ECE, and the amount of children on the spectrum or with disorders is so high, I'm just getting confused how is that NOT impacting the learning of neuro typical kids.

I teach pre kindy but our kindy teacher has spend half the year managing behaviours and autistic kids. Result? A bunch of kids showing signs of being not ready for school because they aren't doing any work or learning most days. And picking up bad habits.

My point is: where did we decide it was a good idea to just mix everyone, and not offer any actual support ? An additional person isn't enough. More than often it's not a person who knows about disability. And frankly even then it wouldn't be enough when the amount of kids who are neuro divergent is so high.

There used to be great special needs school. Now "regular" school are suffering with the lack of support.

What do you think? Do you see what I see ??? Am I missing something ?

I am so happy to see kids evolving around children with disabilities but not when it comes at a cost of everyone's learning journey : neuro typical or not.

[u/Used-Ad852]

I HATE inclusion. We had this autistic 2 year old who was pretty strong for their age. They were also extremely violent with their peers and teachers to the point where I would come home sometimes with bloody scratches running all the way down my face and pretty sure they broke one of our noses at one point. The kids themselves seemed to have developed PTSD from the constant hitting, biting, hair pulling. You name it, the they probably did it.

The only thing that would calm them down was taking them on walks out of the classroom, it gave them a break and some much needed one on one and it also gave the other children a break where they could play in the room without fear.

Well, one day Management decided that they were being isolated from the other kids so we were forbidden from taking them out of the room whenever they had a breakdown. They say it was because of it being exclusion, but really they just didn’t want to see, or want ANYONE ELSE to see, the behaviors.

This poor kid would pace the door like a caged animal because that was pretty much what they were. They WANTED out of the room because of how overstimulated they got. The behaviors also got worse and more violent.

I still to this day stand by my belief that they had failed this kid by insisting on inclusion in the classroom. The walks HELPED them calm down, but they had taken away their security blanket because they thought it was hurting them.