Clueless Administrators

That principal over at this school still hasn't a fucking clue what "CLS" is.

It's not just cooking, for crying out loud. It's COMPREHENSIVE life skills, which runs the whole gamut from learning vocational skills to personal hygiene to social skills (including outings). It's about LIFE.

More violation of special education law at that school, but nobody there dares take this dipshit to task.

The whole point of comprehensive life skills is that it is a self-contained classroom program geared for the moderate to severe special education students and learning disabled kids who are not MR or autistic but several grade levels below and that they are taught LIFE SKILLS they can use for a lifetime such as social skills, simple vocational skills, cooking, mending, arts and crafts, simple money management, and academic skills in reading and math. In high school it is more vocationally oriented. These are kids who cannot take regular classroom courses because they would never be able to do it apart from electives or science (which can be easily adapted for these kids). These kids are such they will not be able to go to college or take vocational courses but they will be functioning members of their communities. At the heart of CLS, in times past was THE "special ed" class in schools around the country, are the community outings where students take regular field trips to businesses, movie theaters, museums, bowling alleys, skating rinks, shopping malls, stores, and so on because important life skills are taught in the field. It's real life experience. Kids learn how to spend money that they have earned in classroom projects. They learn how to act in restaurants and order meals (don't assume parents teach kids this). The kids use public transportation to go to these trips, not school buses, so they know how to use an important source of transportation.

What this principal did was destroy a perfectly good program and thought he could "combine" Home and Careers, a completely different program with a completely different emphasis, with CLS, and wrongfully put ESL kids in a class which they don't need to take but could take an elective, Home and Careers, with the regular student population. If I had still been at that school, I would have fought against him tooth and nail. This is the dumb shit who tried to get me to cheat for him regarding alternate testing.