title:  Teacher Resigns After Being Caught Knocking Special Needs Student To The Floor (VIDEO)
text: Every parent s worst fear is that a teacher will abuse their child. This fear is even greater for parents like myself with special needs children that won t be able to tell us when a teacher like Amelia Stripling is hurting them. Fortunately for Sarah Patterson, the mother of a 4 year old student at Tift County Pre-K Center in Tifton, Georgia, the school has cameras and someone willing to speak up:According to Sarah Patterson, the mother of the boy, her son just turned 4 years old on Wednesday, days after Stripling casually walked around an open classroom door and shoved her knee in the boys back without warning, causing him to lurch forward and to the ground.Stripling then helped the boy up with the help of another adult before giving him a shove into the classroom.It s easy to see that Stripling was trying to get him to move into the classroom. But it s also clear that she was completely unconcerned about how rough she was and only mildly concerned that her student might have hit his head on the ground. If the whole incident had not been caught on tape and reported, Stripling would almost certainly still be working with special needs kids.Here s the video: WALB.com, South Georgia News, Weather, SportsThe United States is staring down the barrel of an educational crisis that will guarantee more scenes like the one above. Never mind the fact that there s a concerted effort underway to gut public education, stripping resources and talent and giving them to  charter schools  that waste billions with worse results; an even greater emergency is the rapid rise of autistic students and the complete failure of our school systems to prepare for them.My family is lucky. We lived first in New York City, which takes early intervention for special needs children VERY seriously (the earlier they get help, the better off they ll be). Then we moved to Northern Virginia (the very liberal part that turned the state purple) and they also take special needs education very seriously. Compare that to Southern Virginia (the inbred redneck to our hippie liberal) where they refuse to officially diagnose my clearly autistic nephew and told his mother that they can t be bothered helping him learn to tie his shoelaces so she should just get him Velcro sneakers.There s going to be a lot more of Southern Virginia than Northern Virginia in this country as millions of kids with special needs move through an educational system that doesn t know how to help them. They can barely handle what they already have and all too often resort to the kind of abuse that Stripling does. Sure, parents with money will be able to afford the expensive services their kids will need but even middle class families will unable to cope. And the working poor? Tough luck! Have fun sending your kid off to a school with a staff that s untrained, uncaring or both.Featured image via video screen capture