Chapter 12 Special Education

I feel that there is a double standard as a child that has a learning disability cannot be labeled disabled if it is due to the fact that they do not speak English.  This seems like a very fine line and can be extremely hard to distinguish what is what. I feel it can trend similar to the times when English speaking children are all labeled ADHD.  Finding the children who truly need medication can be difficult. I feel it can be even harder to figure out if an ELL student needs to be placed in a special education program.  Another difficulty to overcome is from some cultures, too.  People from the Marshall Islands feel that there is a stigma from labeling a child into Special Education Needs.  This label is met with strong opposition from this culture.  Other countries can create another obstacle in the fact that they do not understand what Special Education even means.  As language is a barrier with many of these families, explaining Special Education can be extremely difficult, if their native country has nothing similar to it.
I can also understand the fact that a gifted student can suffer as well.  Being gifted but having a language barrier can cause the student to get behind or missed due to the barrier.  Plus, as the population of non English speaking children grow the public school system seems inadequate to handle these children.  Special Education for English speaking children is limited to the resources available currently.  Adding a language barrier or having several children from different countries seems to make this problem even harder to contend with.  Many schools in America are already short staffed with over crowded classroom, and other schools in rural communities do not have the same resources as the schools in the major cities. These problems seem to impact the community even harder.
More and more responsibilities are added to the teachers as their classrooms diversify.  Understanding what to look for and trying to constantly stay up to date on cultures and the students currently in the classroom seems like an even more daunting task.