"Excuse me, what do you do here?'

Someone at school actually asked me that this week, but that is besides the point.

So on Tuesday, all of the teachers and the principal receive a memo from the speech therapist. She has listed out all of the kids she has to evaluate between April and May and then proceeded to state that she wouldn't be able to provide services to children during this time period. This is ridiculous:
1) First, I think it may be a violation of the students' privacy for her to put out a list like that
2) 2 of the names on her list are students who are in my classroom and she has already done their evaluations
3) Hello, I still have 6 more special education evaluations to complete before mid May, but that does not mean I can stop providing special education services to the children in the mean time.
4) The principal has not and will not confront her on this
5) She may actually have time to service children if she arrived at work on time, took a reasonable amount of time for lunch, and actually worked to the end of the school day. To be more specific, school begins at 830 and she typically arrives at 9, claiming that it just takes her too long to get to work and she cant possibly be there on time. Then she takes over an hr for lunch! By the time she returns from lunch, she works an additional 40 minutes and then leaves about a half hour before the school day is over.
6) And even though she lives too far away to drive in on time in the morning, she drives home for lunch almost each day. In a hummer!

There has to be a better way. its not right that children miss what they are legally entitled to for two months. that lapse in service ultimately effects their progress overall as well as their performance on the evaluation. Furthermore, the majority of our parents don't necessarily advocate for their own children. So it falls on the lap of me, the children's teacher to advocate on their behalf. There has to be a way for her to do both service and evaluation. I have to do it so why shouldn't she? Incidentally it takes about 4 hrs of contact time for me to do each evaluation, not counting observations or writing up the report. Her evaluations require an hr or so of contact time.
End of rant