u/ijustwannabegandalf

Experienced teacher transferring to special education. I've got one day to choose between 2 opportunities for my 1st year as SPED.

Both are push in/ small group teaching high school.

One is at my current school, bigger caseload, less support, "head" of sped is a baby teacher with an emergency cert, but I know all the kids and their families already and would get to set a lot of my own schedule. Absentee and ineffective principal but excellent AP.

Other is a smaller school in a slightly worse neighborhood with a worse commute, but great head of SpEd, smaller caseload and fewer big behavior issues. Long serving and well liked principal, very low staff turnover. However as a smaller school there's always the danger it will be closed the next time my city has a budget crisis, and I'm worried it will look bad on my resume to move to a smaller school.

Gen ed teacher. I have a 9th grader new to school with the accommodation "grade completed work only," but who's also only coming to school maybe 2 days a week.

As an English teacher, I was applying the accommodation to mean, say, instead of the 15 comprehension questions on this chapter, you only need to do the 2 questions on character that are important to the essay, and your "essay" is just an intro and one paragraph to show me you can set a thesis and analyze a character. I'm providing chapter summaries and a film of the book as well since kid will gleefully inform me and mom that "I don't read shit at home." and the kid isn't present most of the time when we're reading in class, and I've assembled into packets and printed out for her the key scenes in each chapter that she needs to actually read in order to demonstrate the focus skills of this book.

Mom thinks "grade completed work" means ONLY the work she turns in can affect her grade at all. So if kid misses Monday and Tuesday, earns a 5/5 completion grade for doing her grammar warm up on Wednesday, cuts class the rest of Wednesday, misses Thursday and has total work refusal on Friday...kid has a 100% A+ on her grade for the week, even if it's the week we spent writing an essay and kid hasn't written, dictated or attempted a sentence.

I am ASSUMING Mom is incorrect? But where can I find support for that?

And if mom is right, how on earth is this accommodation supposed to be applied in a class like high school English where things build extensively on one another and, like, you have to read a book?