Avonte Oquendo is Still Missing.

The Problem?

Lack of Adequate Resources for Students with Special Needs

            Avonte Oquendo has been missing for over a month. The problem is one that is rarely mentioned, the lack of resources and care for students in New York City public schools with special needs.
             Johanna Miller, advocacy director at the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), presents one of the parts of the problem. “School safety officers do not have any knowledge of whether a student has an IEP.” An IEP is an Individual Education Program, which the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) mandated. Miller also states, “ We don’t advocate that the DOE shares these records with the cops, but there’s a gap in how the adults in the building can protect students with special education needs.”
            Another part of the problem that Miller addresses includes the disciplinary rates of students with special needs, especially black students with special needs, which is unfortunately, far too high. “The most blunt statistic is that students with IEPs are suspended twice as often as general education students.” Miller says. She adds that, “Black students with IEPs represent 14 percent of suspensions and only 6 percent of enrollment.” This data represents a pattern of exclusion toward marginalized groups. It pushes out groups such as people with special needs instead of helping them succeed. Black students with special needs, such as Avonte Oquendo, are doubly marginalized.
            Avonte Oquendo was reported as having an IEP that required him to go to a class with a teacher and a paraprofessional for every six students. At the learning center that I used to work at, there was one student with autism who received one-on-one attention. For students with autism, a six-to-one student- faculty ratio is not enough.
            Rima Izquirdo, a 28-year old mother of Darius who is a seven-year old child with autism, mentioned that there was also a six-to-one student-faculty ratio. Darius, like Avonte, is nonverbal. He works with an IEP and receives speech therapy to improve his verbal skills.
            “My child was a runner, probably like Avonte,” Izquierdo says. “They look for when you’re not paying attention and then they run.”
            An employee of Riverview School, where Avonte Oquendo attended, provided details of the scene of the day that Avonte Oquendo was missing. Afterwards, the employee states, “It’s nobody’s fault.”
            But is it really? In a society where school safety officers lack in their safety-patrolling because they do not know if a student has an IEP, is it really nobody’s fault? In a society where students with special needs, especially black students with special needs are more likely to receive punishment than reinforcement, is it really nobody’s fault?  In a society where students with special needs do not receive the proper care and individual attention that they need, is it really nobody’s fault? We need a society that is more welcoming towards students with special needs, one that makes them visible rather than invisible. One that reinforces rather than punishes them, and one that provides them with the one-on-one attention that they need and deserve.
~Jacqueline Retalis
Source
Image Source 

Capitalizing Content: The Trade-off in Native Advertising

            Earlier this month, The New York Times’ executive vice president of advertising, Meredith Kopit Levien, announced that the Times would be adopting some native advertising content. Native advertising has been a contentious topic in discussion around media this past year. You have probably seen some form of it, either on the minor news sites or blogs you read, parading across the bottom of the article as if they are regular content and enticing you to click. Native advertising is sponsored content that is formatted in the style of a typical editorial, holding the appeal of “real” content. It is interesting that such a form has become so widespread; while we may or may not categorize advertising as sinister in our post-recession society, advertising that arranges itself like independent content seems deceiving.
            Leaders in the news industry fall on different sides of the issue; while some sources have adopted the form, others have denounced it. Gerard Barker of The Wall Street Journal has expressed distaste toward the form, as did the Times’ own Jill Abramson last spring. The relationship between news and advertising is a conflicting one. Advertisers rely on the readership of news sources, which exists only because the readers trust the reliability of the news source. If advertising becomes more integrated into this mass, the news source will lose the trust of the readers it relies on. Joe McCambley, the inventor of the banner ad summarizes that with native advertising, news sources “are gambling with the contract [that they] have with [their] readers.” Still, native advertising has the potential to be informative and helpful for consumers, as shown by the Times’ own “pilot” content, a collaboration with the newly launched Citi Bike last spring.
            The issue of Native Advertising has greater implication for the trends in news and media consumption as a whole. As readers, our relationship to advertising is even further complicated; we either must pay for the quality of news through subscription, or be advertised to in order to acquire free content. As people who meet with media everyday, it is ultimately impossible to avoid advertising; it trying to avoid advertising in just one sphere would be a vain attempt. On one hand, I believe in free, open content, but in the face of this, realize the need for creators of such content to be able to capitalize on their own content. The value of our intellectual product can only be determined by our ability to sell it, and we are therefore caught in the trappings of having either to advertise or turn to advertising in the attempt to authorize our work. We are constantly in a trade-off between privacy and access, but to what extent can this really be stretched?
          ~Isabel Stern
Image Source