"By the way, a third of the room is special needs students, and the educational assistant called in sick today"

I got a call last week to sub at a school I am familiar with. So, I accept the job with high hopes. When I walked in to the school, I had no idea that this would be any different than any other day. Boy, was I mistaken!

The teacher was in the room when I arrived, preparing to leave for a day of meetings. It seemed cool enough until she said, off-handedly, "By the way, one third of the room is special needs students, and the educational assistant called in sick."

A little alarm went off in my head. (ding,ding,ding) Alone in a room of 25 or 26 students and no one to help with the profoundly challenged students in the room? Not a pleasant situation.

For the uninitiated, there is a mountain of case law designed to protect the educational needs of these students. That is as it should be. The difficulty arises for the teacher who is responsible for the safety and well-being of these children. If anything goes awry in the classroom, and God KNOWS there are so many things that can go awry, the lawsuits are aimed at the unsuspecting member of the Legion of Substitute Teachers. Yes, the lowly LOST is the unprotected loser in this equation.

Before anyone gets their hackles up, picture this: you have a brittle diabetic child in the room, a student with the mental faculties of a three year old, a young boy with ADHD who is prone to tantrums, another boy who has special needs that will run out of the classroom and away from the campus on a whim, three or four other students who have various learning difficulties and emotional challenges. And that's not even factoring in the other eighteen students who need your attention and protection! Do we see the possibility of risk in this situation? I think so!

What did I do? I stayed. It was two minutes before the bell rang and I didn't know what to do and I surely didn't know my rights as a LOST. After school ended, I went home and had an adult beverage. I then called the central district office for substitute teachers. I asked them to look into this type of situation and inform me what I should do if faced with this kind of dilemma in the future. I will post the outcome of that conversation on the blog.

In my next posting, I will give the delightful details of this assignment. It was so unreal that it seems more like fiction than fact. How I wish it had been fabricated...