"He's not going to school anywhere. He's sitting home waiting." Uncle of a student who is supposed to go to another school but has been sitting home since September.
"They said they were going to send her back to her old school and I said there's no way she's going back there. She's home. Not doing school. She's supposed to do online school with Pathways but she's not doing it yet." Father whose daughter was so stressed out by her old school she all but completely refused to attend.
"Nobody even told me they weren't letting kids return in the Fall, I heard it from a Parent Advocate who heard it somewhere else. This is very concerning since now we have to find him a new school." Parent who heard second hand that her son's program was being closed down.
"My son is not a discipline problem he's mentally ill for God's sake." Parent of a WNYDT student who was reassigned to attend The Academy School.
To be clear, 3 of the 4 parents I've spoken with from WNY Day treatment have told me their children are not doing any school work. This is Week 6.
When Buffalo Public Schools got it into their collective head to close down Western New York Day Treatment in June one has the sense that they knew it was a lame thing to do and nobody wanted to put their name on it. So nobody did. And nobody wanted to embrace the awkward and ugly task of informing parents that their children with documented mental health issues would no longer be attending a therapeutic day school either. BPS just let the chips fall and didn't look back. Maybe nobody wanted to own it because explaining that these kids were being kicked out of their therapeutic program to save money would be a bridge too far for the decision makers to explain to hostile parents. If it was the right and fiscally responsible thing to do it seems someone should have been willing to stand up and explain or defend it. I called there once in late July and was told by the clerk that some guys from the service center came to take away the BPS refrigerator. But nobody ever did call to say Oh by the way we are closing down the program.
Times of crisis are often used as a cover to shuffle funds, make unpopular cuts and generally do things you couldn't get away with under normal circumstances. No less a 5 star creep than Rahm Emanuel is on record as saying Never let a crisis go to waste. Hurricane Katrina served as a smokescreen to demolish low income housing and open up the real estate to gentrifying developers. The school system in New Orleans was swept aside and converted to charters by the ed for profit lobby. Before the smoke cleared from 9-11 we had The Patriot Act rammed through Congress with the claim that it would keep us safe. Later we learned of the infamous Section 215 that said libraries would have to turn over lists of books checked out by anyone the Feds deemed to be suspicious characters. "Roving wire taps" were easily obtained with just one approval from the notoriously permissive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and could be applied to your landline, laptop, cell phone, tablet, desktop, pager, ad nauseam. The Patriot Act at one point also included a provision that gave military recruiters the right to set up shop in high schools and try to sign up students for military service. Any school who balked could be in danger of losing funding. Follow up studies revealed not one terror plot was ever broken up using any of this data and nobody was any safer. Bureaucrats can always take advantage of a crisis to work their agenda. Whether that agenda does anyone else a damned bit of good remains to be seen.
I add these digressions to illustrate how convenient a crisis can be for manipulating the usual orders of business. If WNY Day Treatment hadn't already endured a near death by a thousand cuts I probably wouldn't be so quick to make such connections. But a few years back someone did a head count and decided the program's census didn't justify three teachers. It was decided one teacher would have to go. Thus ended our middle school class. Then they came along a year later and cut the Math and Science position. A year later the Math and Science position was restored then cut again. If you wanted to see how much instability you could inflict on a bunch of kids who'd already been diagnosed with mental health issues you couldn't have devised a more devious scheme.
Yet somewhere in all of this someone from City Hall was walking around with a clipboard looking at numbers telling themselves they were acting in the best interests of children. Isn't that the premise we all operate from when we sign up for a career in education?
In the 2019-2020 school year students enrolled in Western New York Day Treatment were taught English and Social Studies by me as well as CTE, Art and Phys. Ed. In Fall of 2019 parents were warned there would be no instruction in Math or Science possibly for the entire year. Parents thought enough of the program that they were willing to leave their children there even though they'd be missing 2 of their 4 academic subjects. Not one parent opted to remove their child.
Assessing a program of this nature with a raw number count is a terribly myopic and truthfully cruel way to do business. The numbers are always in flux and rarely remain static for months on end. Kids go into the hospital or return to school or move just like they do in the big box high schools many of our students came from. When Covid closed schools in mid-March we had a class with 7 kids in it. It was only supposed to have 6 but the deal on the table was if we could get it up to 8 kids we could restore the Math/Science teacher's position. Our liaison with New York State Office of Mental Health had about 4 more students she was planning to screen for entry into our group. We were that close when the lockdown hit. If we had to choose a mascot from mythology it would be a coin toss between Tantalus and Sisyphus.
The class of 7 we had in March became a class of 4 in late June when one student aged out and two others were deemed ready to be placed back into the school population. To make such a big deal if that's what I'm doing over 4 kids might strike some as excessive. The fact of the situation is it would only be a group of 4 for a short period until some of the kids on the waiting list could be screened and added to the group. As I mentioned above, these groups are always in flux and using a raw number at a given point in time to assess the efficacy of such a program is wrong headed. It's also educationally invalid as it fails to accurately measure what it claims to measure. When you stick a pushpin on the chart in June and say Look! There aren't not enough bodies! before the waiting list can be screened to bring the census back up to where it was you're guilty of using an invalid measure. I also wonder where these counters were when the class had 7 kids in it instead of the state prescribed 6 kids? The damage a raw number headcount does can be calculated in the future kids who could have benefitted from this class not just the 4 kids 3 of whom are essentially on the couch with the remote or in their bedrooms with their laptops watching anime. Since 2008 dozens and dozens of kids have come through the door, made the adjustment, participated in the program and become well enough to move on, If it didn't work I wouldn't be defending it.
