Tenure only comes after a substantial amount of work and often a lot of conformity, fake smiles, overlooking ethics violations in those who are in power, and, often, kissing up to administrators. She does not deserve to lose her tenure. That would make her vulnerable to firing for no reason at all–like a principal who did not want white people working at her all black school did to me.

She is probably a pretty good teacher, but she made a bad mistake. I hope she was also required to take some special education methods and special needs behavior management courses. All regular teachers should be required to. I would have held her to a higher standard if she was a special education teacher because if she was she would have known better. We have to be smart and well educated to do special ed. properly. But a regular teacher does not have our background or training. They are generalists. Autistics are difficult even for special education teachers. Some us have the gift for working with them and some don’t. For that reason inclusion should be done carefully. When I read the original article I read that he was still being evaluated for autism, so the environment and structure (His Least Restrictive Environment) he needed was not in place. The teacher was out of field.

Therefore, this time I would give her back her tenure. However, if she is ever mean to a student again, especially if she applies peer pressure in an inappropriate way, she should lose both her job and her certificate.