Home | How It Works | Stats Login | Register         Case: ESE Parent Blaming Teachers In my internship, I am working in a middle school in the ASD unit. One of our students has a tendency to make violent and inappropriate comments. For example, he recently told one of the teachers in the unit that he was going to slit her throat after she took away a drawing that he was making during instruction time. More recently, he had an altercation with the PE Coach which resulted in him kicking her four times. Due to his situation, the coach did not decide to take serious action against the student, but he was written a disciplinary referral and his parents were contacted. In response to the situation, the student's mother sent a quite nasty email basically blaming the coach which stated that she felt as though the PE Coach could benefit from learning strategies on how to deal with students with autism, and that in future altercations, her son responds best to simply being ignored when he gets upset. She then kept her son out of school for a week so that he could "deal with the trauma he had experienced in PE". The PE coach at our school is ESE certified and has worked with students in our unit for many years. She is understandably quite upset at the mother's response to this altercation, and is now considering pressing charges against the student. How do you all think that the coach should respond to this situation? Solution: (Rates are posted for this solution!) There should be an attempt at a different solution. The PE teacher should contact you to try to set up a conference with the parent. In this situation it is important to be confident and let the parent know there is nothing wrong with the PE teacher. She is certified to teach ESE students and the disciplinary referral is something written in the student code of conduct, which the parent agrees to at the beginning of the year. A behavior plan should be created to monitor the student's behavior. The student needs to know that this behavior is unacceptable and that there are consequences for it.