SCHOOL ADVISER: Gunman A Loner Who Felt No Pain

Well it's nice to know that public schools now take crazy kids.

[link to en.wikipedia.org]

Congenital insensitivity to pain

Yes - because of financial and legal reasons. The Disabilities Act guarantees such kids a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment. Therefore, they can (and often are) batshit crazy but the schools are forced to take them. Then, they can act batshit crazy at school as well and the school has to run through all sorts of hoops for months or years to get them expelled. Even then, the district still needs to provide for their education. The thing is, once a kid has an IEP and is in special education, they have rights way above what the normal kids receive.

When a child has behavior issues, you have to try strategies. If he has a diagnosis from a doctor who says that this "neurological condition" causes the child's education to be affected he is placed in special education. That's when the real fun begins. You have to write a behavior plan with new strategies (after taking weeks worth of data). If this isn't working, you meet with the parents and rewrite the IEP and behavior plan. If this isn't working, you can "escort" the child to in-school suspension or request the parent pick the child up on that day. If the behavior is bad enough, you can suspend, but for no more than 10 days per year for a special ed student. If the behavior is really bad, you can expel but you have to go through the hearing process in order to remove them from the regular school and be placed into an alternative program. The parent will sometimes bring in lawyers and civil rights advocates to try to intimidate and threaten the administrators in order to keep the child in the regular school.

Meanwhile, learning in the entire classroom comes to a halt while all this is going on. The only way you can expel immediately is if the kid brings in a weapon, injures another student on purpose (and even that is a gray area), or makes direct threats heard by staff members (another gray area).

Personally, if you have a crazy kid at school, it's easier if the regular education students start to threaten lawsuits regarding that crazy kid (with regards to their learning being negatively affected or due to potential dangers) because the squeaky wheel gets the grease. That normally gets the administration and school board moving. Otherwise, they will look the other way.

A side note to the above - not all districts are created equal. I worked at one district who put up with no nonsense from any of the students. The schools outperformed all other districts in the state.

Now, I am working for a neighboring district (dumb move on my part) that "works" with these kids and considers this a more moral and kind approach. OMG, I am so sick of kids throwing desks and chairs around the room or screaming for hours on end (with the other kids in the room trying to work) and the administration & school board doing absolutely nothing about it because they are worried about lawsuits from the parents of those SPED kids. It gets ridiculous.