What I am particularly interested in is changing the requirements of DESE for our graduating teachers in MO colleges. Currently, DESE requires students majoring in "regular education" to take only one special needs class called "Exceptional Child". This is the only special needs class that our teachers have under their belt when they enter the the public school classroom, which, no doubt, has several children who are not regularly developing.
It has occurred to me that there really is no regular education in public schools, and that it is a travesty to lie to our upcoming teachers, telling them that they may consider themselves regular education teachers. For thirty years we have had a law in place saying that students with special needs should be allowed in regular classrooms, yet our achingly slow-moving higher education system has not seen fit to train its teachers how to fulfill this law. It's no wonder to me that we as parents meet with such resistence from teachers and similarly- trained administrators.
It seems with training while in college, our bright-eyed young teachers will be willing to embrace inclusion and learn how to work through issues creatively. Presently, the "regular ed" majors don't know anything about how to incorporate all their students into their teaching approach. Similarly, the special ed teachers haven't seemed to learn how to include kids with special needs into a regular ed classroom either. And these specially trained teachers, at least in our school district, are the ones that are supposed to be the support for the regular ed teachers, but they haven't been trained how to support inclusion, only how to teach in seclusion.
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