The Pirates Hook (PH): Please give a name, a brief background of yourself, and what you do here.
Nicholas Flippen (NF): I teach the EC classroom here for students with multiple disabilities, and I’ve been here eight years. I’ve been teaching for nine years, so I’ve been here for most of that time.
PH: You won EC Teacher of the Year for the district. How does it make you feel?
NF: It makes me feel nice. It’s a job a lot of people don’t recognize, so it felt nice to be recognized for once.
PH: Why do you think you won the EC Teacher of the Year? What do you think it takes to win an award like that?
NF: Well, you know, no one told me why I won it, but I hope I want it because I’m a really strong advocate for these kids. Whenever it comes to things that need to get changed so they can have better access to education, to their facilities, whatever, I’m always the person going down there and being like, ‘Hey, we need to change something.’ And I believe strongly in just getting them as included and out there as possible. So I think by doing that, hopefully some people have seen that.
PH: What do you think sets your role and teacher apart from other teaching roles?
NF: I do a lot of paperwork, a lot of which, I mean, all teachers have to do a lot of paperwork, but Special Ed does come with its own, like, extra amount. I also have to do a good bit of caregiving during the day. So like, right now, I’m feeding a student, or, you know, I’m changing diapers, or I’m doing all sorts of, like, physical therapy stuff on top of lesson planning and teaching, 24/7, yeah, pretty much, yes, yeah, absolutely, yeah. And I don’t get a planning period, so it’s, it’s all day.
The Pirates Hook (PH): What do you do to advocate for students and their families?
NF: One of the biggest things that I do is make sure that if a family needs access to a therapy or a device or something that that kid needs. My first thing to do is, as the UC teacher and their case manager, is to make it happen from the paperwork standpoint. If a kid needs something, I’ll start writing up everything that needs to get done. Then I start contacting seeing how we get it done and make sure that it’s in the best interest of the kid first. So just making sure that you’re pulling in the right people that know the kids and they’re gonna be able to bring something to the table that they need.
PH: Do you think that it’s harder for families to get these resources outside of school rather than for them to go through you?
NF: “Definitely, yeah, yeah. It’s a lot harder to get the appropriate amount of resources. I think [when] people see a student with a disability, they think their family just gets a lot of stuff. But they still have to pay for a lot of things out of pocket. And they still have to fight and advocate to get a lot of stuff too, because our kids need a lot of different therapies just to be healthy and be able to come to school.”
PH: What’s the biggest challenge you found? How have you overcome that?
NF: The biggest challenge, I think, is how our kids in this classroom are not seen by other people. I’m not even saying necessarily in this building, but as a whole. It’s not always seen as teaching, or it’s not seen as school, or it’s not seen as important or on the same level, whereas it is. What we’re providing for our kids, we have to provide everything. So I think that’s probably the biggest challenge, people not understanding what all goes into it and not seeing it as valuable as other classrooms.
One way I’ve tried to fight that is to make sure all the administrators know me well. I have no problem talking to them, and so I very regularly invite them into my room to be able to see what it is I do. I go to them about the issues that my kids have and what they need because a lot of times people don’t even understand that that’s something these kids struggle with. It means that a lot of times we’re overlooked, but it’s my job to make sure we’re not overlooked.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
