From CBS News, a followup on the case of Alex Barton, the Florida 5-year-old with behavior problems whose teacher led fellow students in voting to eject him from class.

In an interview that also included Alex and his mother, Melissa Barton, clinical psychologist Jed Baker said teachers need training on including children with special needs in regular classrooms. In the absence of such training, he said, he worries that children are being taught intolerance.

The video (below) shows Alex as a boy who is constantly in motion. Watch the closing moments as Baker and interviewer Harry Smith give him positive reinforcement for staying silent during the interview. “Alex, thank you buddy,” Smith says. Baker offers a high-five. “You did a good job, man.”

Partial transcript follows.

Partial (and unofficial) transcript:

Baker: What is the message we’re teaching our our impressible, five-year-old, kindergarten kids? To accept each other and to value diversity and to teach people to help those with special needs, or are we encouraging intolerance? And I think, when a teacher takes the lead in allowing this to happen or encouraging it, it’s a form of bullying, because she has quite a bit of power in that situation.

Smith: Does it surprise you? Because I have the sense that there are very many schools that are working as hard as they can to mainstream and do the right thing. Does it surprise you to hear that this happened?

Baker: Well, no. because one of the problems we have — we have great laws and good research to say that we can include kids with special needs in regular classrooms in a very effective, very successful way, but we need to train our teachers to do that. We need to fund the training so teachers can support wonderful kids like Alex. If we don’t do that, if we don’t fund that properly, if we don’t do the training, we kind of set everybody up for a tough situation.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at 9:19 am and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, autism, disabilities, discrimination, diversity, education, funding, inclusion, mainstreaming, stigma. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post