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Parents Wire Kids to Prove Their
Teachers’ Classroom Abuse
Employment
continued from page 6
graduating from the University of
Nevada-Las Vegas in December with a
business degree. His family has warned
him for years about the job market, so he
has been building his resume by working
part time on the Las Vegas Strip as a food
runner and doing a marketing internship
with a local airline.
Bawden said his friends who have grad-
uated are either unemployed or working
along the Vegas Strip in service jobs that
In addition, U.S. workers increasingly
may need to consider their position in a
global economy, where they must com-
pete with educated foreign-born residents
for jobs. Longer-term government projec-
tions also may fail to consider “degree
inflation,” a growing ubiquity of bache-
lor’s degrees that could make them more
commonplace in lower-wage jobs but
inadequate for higher-wage ones.
That future may be now for Kelman
Edwards Jr., 24, of
Murfreesboro, Tenn.,
who is waiting to see
the returns on his col-
lege education.
After earning a biol-
ogy degree last May,
the only job he could
find was as a construc-
tion worker for five
months before he quit
to focus on finding a
job in his academic field. He applied for
positions in laboratories but was told they
were looking for people with specialized
certifications.
“I thought that me having a biology
degree was a gold ticket for me getting
into places, but every other job wants you
to have previous history in the field,” he
said. Edwards, who has about $5,500 in
student debt, recently met with a career
counselor at Middle Tennessee State Uni-
versity. The counselor’s main advice: Pur-
sue further education.
“Everyone is always telling you, `Go to
college,’” Edwards said. “But when you
graduate, it’s kind of an empty cliff.”
By some studies, up to 95
percent of positions lost during
the economic recovery
occurred in middle-income
occupations
don’t require degrees. “There are so few
jobs and it’s a small city,” he said. “It’s all
about who you know.”
Any job gains are going mostly to work-
ers at the top and bottom of the wage
scale, at the expense of middle-income
jobs commonly held by bachelor’s degree
holders. By some studies, up to 95 percent
of positions lost during the economic
recovery occurred in middle-income
occupations such as bank tellers, the type
of job not expected to return in a more
high-tech age.
David Neumark, an economist at the
University of California-Irvine, said a
bachelor’s degree can have benefits that
aren’t fully reflected in the government’s
labor data. He said even for lower-skilled
jobs such as waitress or cashier, employ-
ers tend to value bachelor’s degree-hold-
ers more highly than high-school
graduates, paying them more for the same
work and offering promotions.
advertising@theskanner.com
Associated Press writers Manuel Valdes
in Seattle; Travis Loller in Nashville,
Tenn.; Cristina Silva in Las Vegas; and
Sandra Chereb in Carson City, Nev., con-
tributed to this report.
REQUEST FOR QUALIFICATIONS
KITSAP TRANSIT
Kitsap Transit solicits Letter of Interest, Statement of
Qualifications and Performance Data from consulting
firms qualified in the area(s) of UBC compliant commer-
cial improvements, Architecture, Marine Architecture,
Construction Management, Marine Construction Man-
agement, Civil design, Geotechnical, Electrical, Environ-
mental, Structural, Traffic and Value Engineering, to
assist with the development of Transit Capital Facilities,
on an on-call basis.
Qualified firms will be on a short-list for multi-disciplinary
and/or specialized area(s) for one year with an option to
extend for one year. This solicitation is to determine qual-
ifications for potential projects and is not to be construed
as an offer or an acceptance. No request for services is
implied nor guaranteed. Specific projects will be negoti-
ated based upon scope and budget.
PLEASE SUBMIT a Statement of Qualifications with a
letter indicating main area of interest and in-house pro-
fessional expertise and a SF 330 (Part II) indicating
examples of former work applicable to a suburban/rural
transit agency to Cathy Whitehead, Capital Development
Dept., 60 Washington Ave., Ste. 200, Bremerton, Wash-
ington 98337, (360) 824-4941. Submissions shall be lim-
ited to 10 pages total excluding the SF330, cover and
dividers.
The deadline for submittals: 4:00 p.m., FRIDAY, May 18,
2012
4-25-12
By Geoff Mulvihill
The Associated Press
CHERRY HILL, N.J. (AP) — Teachers
hurled insults like “bastard,” “tard,” “damn
dumb” and “a hippo in a ballerina suit.” A
bus driver threatened to slap one child,
while a bus monitor told another, “Shut up,
you little dog.”
They were all special needs students, and
their parents all learned about the verbal
abuse the same way - by planting audio
recorders on them before sending them off
to school.
In cases around the country, suspicious
parents have been taking advantage of con-
venient, inexpensive technology to tell them
what children, because of their disabilities,
are not able to express on their own. It’s a
practice that can help expose abuses, but it
comes with some dangers.
This week, a father in Cherry Hill, N.J.,
posted on YouTube clips of secretly record-
ed audio that caught one adult calling his
autistic 10-year-old son “a bastard.” In less
than three days, video got 1.2 million views,
raising the prominence of the small move-
ment. There have been at least nine similar
cases across the U.S. since 2003.
“If a parent has any reason at all to sug-
gest a child is being abused or mistreated, I
strongly recommend that they do the same
thing,” said Wendy Fournier, president of
the National Autism Association.
But George Giuliani, executive director of
the National Association of Special Educa-
tion Teachers and director of special educa-
tion at Hofstra University in Hempstead,
N.Y., says that while the documented mis-
treatment of children has been disturbing,
secret recordings are a bad idea. They
could, he said, violate the privacy rights of
other children.
“We have to be careful that we’re not
sending our children in wired without
knowing the legal issues,” Giuliani said.
Stuart Chaifetz, the Cherry Hill father,
said he began getting reports earlier in the
school year that his 10-year-old son, Akian,
was being violent.
Hitting teachers and throwing chairs were
out of character for the boy, who is in a class
with four other autistic children and speaks
but has serious difficulty expressing him-
self. Chaifetz said he talked to school offi-
cials and had his son meet with a
behaviorist. There was no explanation for
the way Akian was acting.
“I just knew I had to find out what was
happening there,” he said. “My only option
was to put a recorder there. I needed to hear
what a normal day was like in there.”
On the recording, he heard his son being
insulted - and crying at one point.
He shared the audio with school district
officials. The superintendent said in a state-
ment that “the individuals who are heard on
the recording raising their voices and inap-
propriately addressing children no longer
work in the district.”
Since taking the story public, Chaifetz,
who has run unsuccessfully for the school
board in Cherry Hill and once went on a
hunger strike to protest special-education
funding cuts, said he has received thousands
of emails.
At least a few dozen of those he has had a
chance to read have been from parents ask-
ing for advice about investigating alleged
mistreatment of their children.
It’s easy, he tells them.
“It was a simple $30 digital audio
recorder. I just put it in the kid’s pocket,” he
said. “Unless they’re looking for it, they’re
not going to find it.”
With more parents taking such action, he
said, fewer educators may get out of line
with the way they treat students who cannot
speak up for themselves.
Read the rest of this story online at
www.theskanner.com
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4-25-12
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Your Best Source for Local News is
also online at www.theskanner.com
4-25-12
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April 25, 2012 The Seattle Skanner Page 7