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I am not sure that any crime has been committed by anyone here, unless it is illegal in NJ to verbally abuse a student in a public school. Since the events took place in a public area, I am not sure that the people being taped had any reasonable expectation of privacy. Anyone could have come in at any time.
Mr. Chaifetz is not a bully. He is more properly termed a whistle blower, and I am wondering whether there may not be some legal protection for him in that regard.
It is really interesting that you feel that the feelings of the teachers carry more weight than the feelings of the children in that classroom.
The word "slander" is inappropriate. No one has been slandered. The women said what Chaifetz alleges they said.
You do realize that a majority of the people who are disagreeing with you are teachers, do you not? There is no "smear campaign." The people you are calling bullies have done nothing except express their opinions that what went on in that classroom, evidenced by what was recorded on the tapes, is wrong. I doubt that anyone here is calling or writing to the parties involved. No one is being bullied.
As has been repeatedly pointed out to you, it was not five minutes or five percent. It was six and a half hours. The abuse of this child started the minute he set foot off the bus and continued all day long. Would you feel differently if you had a transcript proving that to you? Right now we have only Chaifetz's word. Since I see no reason for him to lie, I choose to believe him.
suzy, I applaud your response to this ridiculous accusation against the father that he is the bully. Whistle blower is the perfect term in this situation.
I hope and pray we see more parents paying much more attention to what's really going on in their kids' classrooms.
I'm guessing dad is in all sorts of legal trouble now after releasing the name of the teacher. It looks like this is going down as slander. We'll see how it plays out in court. I hope dad has lots of money for a lawyer. Most teacher unions will foot the bill for a teacher in a lawsuit. I, for one, will wait for a jury to decide this one. After dad released her name, she has no choice but to go to court to try and defend herself. This guy is a piece of work. Self appointed judge, jury and executioner.
If she turns out to not have participated in this, I hope they fry him. No one died and made him judge, jury and executioner and he has no right to try to ruin someone elses reputaion and life (even if she's guilty. It's just not his place). He's a bully. Plain and simple.
Kelly is the teacher and she has the inappropriate conversation about her husband in front of the students.
• Jodi and Kelly Speaking Angrily to Children.
• Inappropriate Conversation 2
Another clip of staff talking about personal issues (in this case Kelly complaining about her husband) and then getting mad at a student who interrupts her.
*******************
At 3:55 Kelly mentions me by name and how to lie if I ask for her on Field Day: “So if Stu says ‘where’s Kelly?’ Oh she has to take care of some work.” Jodi interjects “She’s inside, she’s inside!”
Here's the problem.
"[Kelly] Altenburg said she had been attending an hour-long meeting when the recordings were made and was not in the room when Akian was allegedly told to "shut up," among other comments."
The father's website indicated she was there taunting the student. While, Kelly claims she was at a meeting at the same time the father accuses her of making inappropriate comments on audio. The two stories don't jive. Either Kelly & the teachers she met with are all lying or the father really doesn't know who the voices are.
So the father now says, "Chaifetz responded by saying Altenburg is culpable because the incident occurred in her class. "
So it goes from Kelly making the comments to well she is still to blame b/c it was in her classroom. It sounds like the father has contradicted himself. He is not able to correctly identify who has said what in the audio but that doesn't stop him from publicly targeting the classroom teacher. Giving out her identity without really knowing what happened.
I don't know how you would prove whose voices are whose on an audio recording outside of guessing. I imagine that that will be a large issue in the outcome of this particular situation, which in no way settles the issue on any of the topics of discussion in this thread.
One important thing to note is that autistic children may very well respond in a tantrumlike manner (including aggressive, destructive, and self-harming behavior) to completely benign stimulus in a school environment. You can't analyze behavior until you do a functional behavior analysis... track it, note all the conditions leading up to the behavior each time it is exhibited, study the data collected over a period of time. THEN you can hypothesize about why it is happening with more hope of a degree of accuracy. It isn't as simple as, "My kid has tantrums at school. I never see him having tantrums at home. He must be being abused by the staff! Why else would he be having tantrums?" Hmmm...there are a million possibilities, as it turns out.
Most parents do understand this, particularly if they have been proactive in attaining behavioral intervention therapy for their child prior to starting school, and have been "around the block" a few times, so to speak, have done a good job of educating themselves. In my experience, the parents who don't understand this are the parents who, surprisingly, don't have a good working knowledge of autism. This does happen in the case of parents who have been in a good deal of denial about whether or not their child is autistic in the first place, and among those who have really never done much by way of behavioral therapy for their child.
I have known parents who question why something as simple as cleaning up the toy area when it's time to go to lunch would trigger an aggressive meltdown, when "that never happens at home." Usually, a conversation about how things are done at home reveal the answers. You start asking questions. "When it's time to finish playtime and move on to chores (or whatever), what procedure do you use in the home? Our procedure is to give a five-minute audio and visual signal, as well as a verbal direction, that playtime will soon be over, and it will be time to clean up. Then we give a signal at one minute. We give verbal and visual instructions that it is time to clean up, and play special music that we only play at clean-up time. We prompt through clean-up time as needed. What do you do at home when it's time to clean up toys and move on?" The typical response: "Oh...we don't really DO cleanup time at home. H/She just leaves his/her toys out. We don't really make him/her clean up." Oh, okay. Well, what do you do when it's time to not play with toys, maybe move on to lunch time, etc.? Sample response: "Oh, we don't really make him/her take part in mealtime with the family if he/she doesn't want to. If he/she's not done playing, we just let him/her go." Oh, okay, why? Parent: "Oh, he/she would throw a fit if we tried to remove him or her from the toys!" And, there's your answer. Your child doesn't tantrum at home, because no demand is made. If you made the same demand, you might well see the same tantrum.
Often, kids will respond to the structure of school with negativity, particularly if it doesn't match what expectations are held or not held with consistency at home. Most neurotypically developing kids can regulate with ease that school and home don't have the same rules. Kids with autism don't make those transitions well. It is basically normal and unsurprising that, when encountering different expectations, kids with autism spectrum disorders (initially, at least, until they learn and become accustomed to different expectations...which is HARD and TIME-CONSUMING for autistic children), respond with tantrum-type behavior. It's not terrible, it's pretty normal, for autism. Parents coming in and saying, "But my kid doesn't ACT THAT WAY at home...What are YOU doing wrong?" doesn't help their child to succeed in a school environment, which will have different expectations at home.
None of this is meant to go against the parent in this particular situation, who, from everything I've seen, heard, and read, is completely in the right. In this case, the parent going undercover DID uncover inappropriate treatment of his child. At the very least, the personnel in the audio are people who have no patience for the behavior of autistic children, and should therefore absolutely NOT be working with autistic children, even if no emotional abuse had occurred. He is absolutely in the right to feel that his child was being treated abusively, and by unprofessional staff.
BUT, having worked extensively with very aggressive children with autism, I cringe to think if, every time I did an incident report regarding a child behaving aggressively, it were turned around on me by a parent saying, "Well, see, he/she doesn't DO that at home...what are you doing to him/her?" Except that wouldn't happen at my facility, because we tape everything, document everything, have multiple crisis support measures in place, parents can view footage of everything and view all data that relates to their child, and data is taken on essentially everything in the child's day. Behavioral patterns and antecedents are in black and white and easy to track and analyze, we are staffed with trained, certified behavior analysts. The data may show that aggressive outbursts occur with the most frequency and intensity when having to share a toy with another student...if the student is an only child, or is often isolated from other children, and never really gets to practice these skills, this is not surprising. The data may show that mornings when the most aggression is observed correlate with mornings that the parent has indicated via daily home communication notes that the child slept less than 4 hours the night before. Data may show that aggression is more frequent right before lunch...the kid's reaction to being hungry, possibly? Most importantly, everything is 100% transparent. You HAVE TO operate this way when you are working with children with intense behavior, as is the case with many children with autism. Most public schools? Not equipped to do this. Not equipped for severe behavior. Just not.
I'm guessing dad is in all sorts of legal trouble now after releasing the name of the teacher. It looks like this is going down as slander. We'll see how it plays out in court. I hope dad has lots of money for a lawyer. Most teacher unions will foot the bill for a teacher in a lawsuit. I, for one, will wait for a jury to decide this one. After dad released her name, she has no choice but to go to court to try and defend herself. This guy is a piece of work. Self appointed judge, jury and executioner.
If she turns out to not have participated in this, I hope they fry him. No one died and made him judge, jury and executioner and he has no right to try to ruin someone elses reputaion and life (even if she's guilty. It's just not his place). He's a bully. Plain and simple.
An FBA WILL show patterns. But it has to be a true FBA, conducted over time. It can't be, "Oh, I sat with the student for a couple of hours, and, yeah, didn't really get any data."
Given that the abuse went on all day, I don't see how she was out of the classroom for all of it.
Also, note that the dad probably knows the voices.
Also note that he requested and IEP meeting and the teacher and aides were attempting to sabotage that.
Also note that they did an FBA and could not figure out why the boy was reacting this way - there is always some reason.
Perhaps he just responds differently at school. I find TabulaRasa's post quite informative. School is not home. It is, etirely, possible that a child could respond differently at school than at home. I'm pretty sure mine do. I often wonder just which children they're talking about when I go to parent teacher conferences. My kids are not THAT good.
Even if the teacher was in the room, there's no proof she heard what was going on. Some voices are, obviously, close to the boy and some are not. It is, entirely, possible, as she claims, she did not hear the abuse. I know I don't hear everything said in my room. There have been plenty of times when I heard the aftermath but not what caused the incident because my attention was elsewhere. Sometimes, I'm working with a student or a group of students and something happens somewhere else in the room and I can't tell you what happened. The last accident report I filled out was filled out based on student statements because I did not see the accident. Just the student running towards me yelling that he had something in his eye. I'll be honest, all kinds of things probably happened in that room while I had him at the eye wash that I have no idea about. Half my class could have left early and I wouldn't have known it.
I do not hear everything my team teacher says to every child when she's working with them. If someone claimed she was abusive towards a child, I couldn't tell you if she was or she wasn't.
If this father really wanted to show that the staff was the cause of the tantrums, he should have told them they were being recorded. That would have had them on good behavior. If that stopped the tantrums, he would have had proof it was the staff that was the problem. As things are, we don't know if the boy was responding to the staff or the staff to the boy. I will give you the woman who came in talking about her drinking bing needed to be fired. That was inappropriate. As to telling a child to shut their mouth, well....I've seen that work too well when my team teacher does it. It has an amazing effect. First their eyes get really big, they start to say something, think better of it and for the next 20 minutes I can teach them anything. They know when Miss K says "Shut your mouths" she means business. It's rude enough to be effective. Honestly, I wouldn't think twice if a para or special ed teacher said that to a child. I would assume they know what works.
I'm guessing dad is in all sorts of legal trouble now after releasing the name of the teacher. It looks like this is going down as slander.
Truth is a complete defense in a slander case. Please explain exactly what law the dad has broken by releasing the name of the teacher.
Remember a few years ago when some network conducted what was basically a sting operation where they would catch men soliciting online what they thought were underage girls for sex? In reality, it was a reporter. When a man would arrange what he thought was going to be a meeting with an underage girl, the TV cameras would show up instead. According to the logic you have espoused throughout this thread, I am guessing that you would consider the reporter the real bully because hey, the poor guy didn't know he was going to be recorded.
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