The integration of pupils with disabilities into regular classrooms has never been solved to everyone’s satisfaction.
On the eve of her retirement as president of Quebec’s largest teachers’ labour federation, Josée Scalabrini is calling for collective reflection on the issue of integrating children with learning or adaptation difficulties into regular classrooms.
When the issue of integrating these students into regular classrooms was decided several years ago, “we were not against it,” Scalabrini said.
“We always said that there would be accompaniment, support” and that this would “allow for the respect of the rights of all students — the right of the other students to learn as well.”
But in reality, “we experienced this integration of students at the same time as big cuts were taking place,” she said, and this made for a kind of “savage” integration, she said.
Many teachers found themselves with several “intervention plans” per classrooms for students with different needs and not enough professionals to support them.
Beyond classroom makeup, there are all kinds of social missions today at school in addition to the teaching of subjects, Scalabrini said.
“School has become a solution to all the problems of society. When there is a scandal or a problem? Look, ‘It takes a new course’ or ‘We have to put this in the curriculum’ — a curriculum that is already overwhelmed,” she said regretfully.
“It has reached the point where parents have no choice — our society which has made it so — but we put children in school at barely 6:30 in the morning and pick them up at 6 at night … The only thing we don’t do now is to give them baths and put them in their pajamas. Is that where society is headed? We have to ask big questions.”
How else to explain that it is difficult to recruit teachers, that training periods had to be shortened and that it was necessary to recruit teachers who are legally unqualified, when teaching is a well-paid profession?
Simple, said Scalabrini: “The profession has changed so much over the years that many have been discouraged.”
Someone who decides to become a teacher does so “because of passion” because one wants to spread knowledge, provide a foundation for learning, to stimulate young people and to follow their development.
But “it has become so bureaucratized, so focused on paperwork, statistics and any other related tasks … that they can no longer do what they went to school to learn to do: teach.” And many quit in the early years of their career, she said.
“Our evaluations no longer serve the student’s learning, no longer serve as a way to guide our students as they should. Evaluation has become long lists of statistics that we mus fill out to serve the government,” said the longtime FSE president. The FSE is affiliated with the CSQ.
What will Scalabrini do after her June 30 retirement?
“I will take a vacation — one thing I did not do a lot over the past 16 years. Because when you are as passionate as I am, you are always attached to what has to be done.”
Also, “I’m going to find Josée, because I have the feeling that I lost her over the years. She gave so much of herself to her work,” she said.
“After that, what to do? Time will tell.”