I’m exhausted and beat down - kindergarten teacher

Tomorrow is our first day - you're scaring me! LOL
I won't see my kinders til next week, though...

It will get better (please, God!) as they get used to the routine. Hang in there.

Dexter
I hope your district is large enough to have a class for emotional disturbed children and the child can be placed there.

((((Hugs))) that seems like a big class for Kinder even without the special needs. Do you have an aide or a para?

Our kinder classes are at 21. About 25% of them are still 4. A few just turned 5. Why we let schools be daycares for those kids at that age still shocks me. We require them to know 120 sight words before they leave this grade. It used to be 20 about 15 years ago and kids had to be at least five to enter school (by the beginning of August or September). While our kinder kids still get to do a lot of organized play for socializing, the academics are amped up in every grade and the stress on the teachers and kids is apparent.

OP, I feel for you. We have a few kids like this in our school. Our first grade teacher was limping this morning from being stomped on by one of her students. As long as the kids don't get hurt, we just keep those kids in the room. It just shocks me. I taught ten year olds for 28 years and very rarely saw this type of behavior with kids in my grade level. Thankfully I only had one kid who thought about attempting to bully me and I shut that down right away. I was raising teen boys at the time and just reacted to keep myself from harm.

Right now I have kinder kids for 30 minutes a day. They are all pretty sweet, but man are they super low and one of the lowest is a retained girl. How parents don't know that you should teach your kids some basic skills before attending school is kind of beyond me. Feral describes a few kids perfectly.

Hugs!

I have to say that my sympathy goes out to all Kinder teachers this year. I taught kinder before I had my own kids and now my youngest is in Kinder. I taught at her preschool last year and was in her classroom (Junior Kindergarten/Pre-K) 3 days a week. Oh my goodness, 50%+ of those kids were out of control! I think that there is definitely something to to be said about these Covid kids. My youngest turned 2 the first week of lock down, she has 3 older siblings, she's precocious, but overall a good kid (but not a saint by any stretch). I have never seen kids so out of control as the kids in her class last year. The hitting, kicking, biting, scratching, defiance, and total lack of responsibility/accountability whatever on the part of many of the parents was astounding. I would come in from helping in other classrooms and she would walk up to me and roll her eyes and say "Mommy they are just too loud and don't listen." We had a handful that there was a literal sigh of relief on the days we realized that they weren't going to be coming, because their energy changed the entire dynamic of the classroom. We had the parents of one of the most difficult kids essentially tell us they had given up trying and they were hoping that the Kinder teacher would "fix" him next year. 

But to give you hope I have been subbing almost daily in our two preschool classes this year and the kids are wonderful. So fingers crossed this year is an anomaly and that it gets better!!!

The problem with this is that even if the district has a school/class for these kids it can take forever to get them transferred there. My district has a program for children who are violent in school (an elementary program, so sad...) -- But, unless the parents agree it's really hard to get a kid there. Some years ago we had one child at my school who every day would throw things, attack the teacher, scream, try to run away... The SPED teacher would spend ages every morning guarding the front door while she and another teacher tried to wrangle this kid without setting him off more and without just putting him in an armlock (which of course is frowned on, ) But the parents didn't want him in a special program. Somehow they thought he could learn more from being with other kids who did not have these issues. That works well with some types of problems, but this kid was too much of a disruption to have any learning going on while he was in the room.

So what the school had to do was document each and every instance of violence, and the county regulations say that after a certain number then the kid can be transferred. And unfortunately part of that documentation meant calling the police so there was a police report. It got to be and regular part of the school day to see the police officer walking into school. It was all very sad, but in the end the school was able to transfer him to the self-contained program. I don't understand parents like that. Of course none of us want to admit our kids have problems. But faced with all that violence I don't understand why they wouldn't want to have the kid in a place where there were many adults trained to help him, and where the classes were very small...?

Anyway, that's a long answer to your comment.   But it's complicated. 

I am so sorry that you were dealing with this and are not getting the support that you need. The system is painfully slow when a teacher in Classroom is in crisis. One way that I have dealt with us in the past is by having a solid rotation of parent volunteers in my classroom this allowed me to get the support that I needed, but resulted in many parents going to administration about the safety and education of their children.

In both cases that I implemented this, things started to change rather quickly after parents got involved. We are often ignored, but as we know community members seem to get action much quicker by having the volunteers in my classroom they were able to see that I was doing everything I could given the situation in no way shape or form were they upset with me?

Would it be possible to do something similar in your situation?

I just ate lunch with our kindergarten teachers yesterday (I work in the school office) and they feel the same way! All 3 classes are filled with really “big” personalities who cannot follow directions at all. And all have gone to preschool!

Hope the year gets better!

I am an elementary school sub (former teacher who resigned to raise my kids and now that they are grown, don't EVER plan to go back full time!!!) However, I like the flexibility of subbing so I just stick it out. In my district, they used to have the students with special needs separated into different buildings. We have 10 elementary schools so the students with autism were all grouped together in 1 building, physical handicapped students in a different building, ED students in a different building, etc. They had staff specifically hired to work in those classrooms alongside their teachers. Lots of support and assistance. SOmeone at the board office got the brilliant idea to bring all of these kids back to their home schools. Now, I have no problem with any of the kids. What I have a problem with is that the district doesn't have enough support to spread throughout the district now that these kids are in all the buildings. They cant hire enough or retain the ones they hire. So, they are being placed in regular ed classrooms (especially the behavior students) more regularly. As a teacher, I see firsthand how much time I spend and the others spend dealing with these behavior issues to the detriment of the rest of the class. If I were a parent of an elementary school kid right now in our district, I would think long and hard about pulling my kid out and homeschooling, and I don't really believe in that. But, the average students are falling through the cracks to meet the needs of the handful placed in each building and its sad. Seeing all of this, on top of everything else being piled on to these teachers responsibilities and the parents they have to deal with... I'll never go back full time. I love the option of walking away at the end of the day and not going back to a certain class if there were major issues!!!  My heart goes out to all educators and anyone working in the schools right now... things suck!

In my district it was that "least restrictive" thing. But the problem is, at as it's been explained to me, that those who make these laws don't seem to really understand an actual classroom.   "Least restrictive" doesn't necessarily mean "best for the child", as we all know. A child who can't control his/her behavior and resorts to throwing things needs some sort of "restriction" and needs adults who are trained in how to help that child learn control. Flinging the child into a larger class with one teacher who probably isn't SPED trained, and maybe pulling that child out for an hour or so per day, is not the best way to teach them. My opinion anyway. 

I spent yesterday (and today, sigh...) in a 4th grade class that thankfully is on the smaller side -- 18 -- because wow. There is one autistic boy in this class who isn't a big behavior problem. But, there was no one who came into the class to work with him, not once in the day. As a sub I have the luxury of being able to let things slide (for ex., I just ignored him when he refused to move on to Virginia Studies after math, and I let him continue with the math program on his iPad) since he wasn't a big behavior problem. But the regular teacher has to battle with that every day. 

Then there are at least five low language kids, one of whom is a native English speaker which means there is something else going on there. Parents don't want the kid evaluated for anything. The other four were pulled out for part of the language arts block. Otherwise the teacher has to do the differentiated lessons for everything else. I don't believe that ELL kids should be segregated in their own class (they used to do that in this district, years ago) because they'll learn more English from being with native speakers, but I mention it because it's just one more thing on the teacher's plate. 

Then there are two ordinary behavior issues. One kid just Cannot. Stop. Talking. omg. Another is just all over the place, can't stay in a chair, can't sit on the carpet in a circle, etc. So the teacher spends unending time trying to redirect the kid. I have no problem with kids choosing to sit on the floor when they're doing independent or small-group work, but if you choose to sit on the floor that does not mean you can roll across that floor from one side to the other. 

Anyway, sorry for the long rant... haha All that to say that if you add a kid or two into that mix who has even bigger issues...well, teachers are pulled in a million directions and certainly can't get everything done that they need to. 

Wow, that’s a lot to have to deal with. The governor here has been pushing hard for universal pre-k ever since he was elected. I don’t think 4 year olds are regularly admitted into kinder here. I’m sure it’s going to be a really rough road ahead for the teachers of all the kids who missed out on those early years of school during Covid. So much of that early school experience is needed to build on in the later years and those kids just didn’t get it.

I think parents in general are allowing so much more bad behavior that it never gets nipped early when it would be most beneficial. Even my kid complains daily about how all the younger kids on her bus are feral and they’re 4th-5th grade supposedly “gifted/talented” kids and the 6th-7th grade middle schoolers that attend her school.

My district is all about inclusion, except as per usual, it is an unfunded mandate. In addition, they can't find people who want to be SPED 1:1 paras, even if they deign to fund them. Our SPED team is overloaded dealing with these behavioral challenges, and then no one else gets their services. On average, takes us at least 1.5 years to be able to move a child into a self-contained program.

I've been teaching in Texas since 2008 and have never seen an actual 1:1 para for any child. They're simply not funded. And there are definitely kids who would benefit.