Tuesday 27th April 2021
Every week brings a new drama at school, this week it is all over ear defenders. Yep you read that right, frigging ear defenders. Riley has really been struggling with the noise level of the classroom again and has forgotten that he has ear defenders in school, so after a brief reminder he has started to use them again and low and behold problems start.
Riley can only wear them apparently when the teacher dictates and must remove them when she is addressing the class so she has his full attention. Really his full attention, by getting Riley to remove them you are causing him physical pain, his hearing is massively intensified and as a result he goes in on himself and his attention goes to zero. So after several meltdowns at home from Riley we got to the cause of the problem (teacher making him remove his ear defenders) and approached the teacher. As always she smiled politely and agreed with everything we said. This was on Thursday of last week.
Monday comes around and after school we are barely through the door and Riley goes into a massive meltdown,
Now after school meltdowns are not a rare occurrence but we usually get at least 30-60 minutes before the first one occurs. If the first one occurs within the first fifteen minutes we know something specific has happened.
After helping him to regulate and calm down he was able to tell us that the teacher had told him to remove his ear defenders again and when he said he didn’t have to, she had told him he did while she addressed the class. When the red mist that had descended over me lifted a little, I asked Riley for a little more detail before going after the teacher. Making sure that he had been paying attention when she was speaking, that he definitely could hear her when she spoke and that it was his main teacher not a replacement and there came the problem.
It turns out they have a trainee teacher taking over most of the teaching in Riley’s class at the moment (no we were not informed, which is always great with a child that needs to be prepared for these sort of things), the information had not been passed across and she was the one who had told Riley to remove them.
We have spoken to the teacher again, who apparently is horrified that Riley was told to remove them, and she will pass on the information after we again reiterated the inclusion policy, disability act and the fact it physically hurts him.
It is problems like these that we are facing every week with the school that is seriously making us consider home educating but I will save that rant for another blog. We currently have the aim to keep the children in school until the end of this school year, when we will reassess but with continual avoidable problems like this it really is getting harder to find valid reasons every day to send them.
