My mother was a first grade teacher for 30 years up until last year. I can tell you from listening to her that her hands were definitely tied when it came to teaching and discipline. Over the last ten years the budget was cut for special ed programs, so those with learning disabilities were put back into the general population classrooms for thier core studies. Because of that she had to spend the majority of her time teaching the SE kids. This meant less material was being covered and the majority of kids were having to have the material picked up at home (that's if the parents helped at all). On top of that the spanish speaking kids who knew no english (or very little) were now filtering into the system, so she had SE children and non-english speaking children. To make matters a little more complicated, her school was the only one around for 100 miles that had open enrollment, so any discipline problem child that had been expelled came to her school. So now she had to deal with disruption in the extreme on top of that. And you can't touch the troublemakers at all. Can't set them out in the hall by themselves, isolate them in any way, no corporal punishment of course, etc.... She finally retired early this year because of the frustration. This is the typical small school in SW KS.
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