Opinion: Failing Forward – MCPS Policy Mismanagement in Restorative Justice and Special Education

February 26, 2024 – Opinion submitted by an MCPS elementary school special education teacher of 10 years

Once upon a time, in the summer before we returned from COVID, the county pushed a new initiative. Rooted in peaceful ideals, restorative justice (RJ) was sold as a panacea for hate and inequity, promising tolerance and love. How did it go? So well that we’ve locked our bathrooms and are looking at installing metal detectors.

Reality of Restorative Justice

The tl;dr of RJ practices is that, through supporting victims’ voices and mediating conversations with offenders, empathy and accountability will grow. Instead, at the ground level, administrators were stripped of their ability to enforce consequences, victims were forced to sit with bigots and abusers, and teachers and students were robbed of safety. At my elementary school, two upper grade-level students filmed themselves slapping a non-verbal, autistic kindergartener on his exposed butt while he was trying to use the bathroom. Those students then showed their film to their entire grade at recess. 

Personal Experiences

What happened next caused me to threaten to quit. Admin gave one student a half-day in-school suspension and the other a talking-to. How did they address the victim’s needs? How did they restore trust, safety, and justice after he was sexually assaulted in their building? They didn’t. Until I stood over them and told them I would not return to their building until they sent a community letter, suspended both students out of school, let the victim’s family know, and sought mental health services for all parties.

Least Restrictive Environment

Speaking of students with special needs: Perhaps the second most harmful practice MCPS engages in is the weaponization of the least restrictive environment (LRE) mandate of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). LRE is the idea that students with disabilities should be educated in the least restrictive environment (the environment that most closely resembles the regular education setting) where they can receive a free and appropriate public education (FAPE). That is, students should be able to get the best education with the least amount of harm to them and their peers. MCPS, however, will tell you that all kids, regardless of services they received in their home county or country, and disregarding their presenting needs, should start in the general education and fail their way up to an appropriate placement.

Trauma to Students, Staff and Families

What this looks like, sadly, is awful trauma to students, classmates, staff, and families. In the past three years, I have:

  • Babysat a non-verbal autistic student for 6 months in a windowless room, where he watched videos and ate candy all day. Prior to moving in with me and my roommate, he had destroyed his classroom, thrown items at students and staff, disrobed, and kicked/hit/bit/spat countless times.
  • Babysat a student with childhood-onset schizophrenia for 6 months in a windowless room, where he saw and heard visions of demons, harmed himself and others, all while MCPS used mine and my coworker’s master’s degrees to engage in his intricate ballet, imaginary, and musical fantasies. Prior to moving in with us, he had run out of the building and into traffic, spat, kicked, hit, rolled himself into the classroom carpet, tried to throw himself from stairwells, and run into neighboring classrooms countless times.
  • Watched colleagues be permanently injured.
  • Listened to students’ peers quietly share how scared they were, and how scared they still are, even when the students are moved to appropriate settings.

More Malpractice

I could write a novel about the disgusting malpractice I have been a party to: supervisors who demand we deny the rest of our caseloads their legally required services to service inappropriately placed students, supervisors who knew we were picking a student up from their house in our cars because we were only hosting them at school for half a day. If you think perhaps they didn’t fully know, you’d be wrong. I’ve sat in meetings with the head of school psychology, the head of social workers, and the director of special education himself, and they all turned a blind eye.

Conclusion

So here we are, at the end of our tenure as an elite system. Our students are illiterate, ill-supported, and ill-behaved. Already, these same students are entering the community as adults without skills, without values, without understanding community norms.

Our final hope is to band together and tell our leaders: we’ve had enough. We need help. We need change. We need consequences. We need self-contained programs.

It’s not too late, but it almost is.

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