Any help?

Well I know it's been quite some time since I've blogged but it's been an overwhelming few months in the classroom.

There's a boy in my class who I'm pretty sure has undiagnosed special needs. He's already been in school for two years before this and now we're in the third term and he can't read, write, do sums with numbers higher than 5, or count higher than 15. He struggles to even complete handwriting worksheets now. He can only baby talk, and his Arabic is the same. He's not progressing in the same way or even the same direction as the other kids and even though I know I haven't studied child development in depth, I can tell there's something going on. He just doesn't have the capability that the other kids have for the work load, but the curriculum isn't designed for special needs kids. Special needs don't exist here. And now because he isn't able to do the same work at the same level as the other kids (which is basically what the curriculum requires and his parents want), his behavior is out of control.

On a good day, he just lays on the floor under the desk. Usually backwards over the seat of the chair, but sometimes on the floor under two desks. He meows, makes siren noises, shouts "one hundred!" over and over again for the whole day. And even though I don't want to put him out of the classroom, he's not learning, he's preventing the other kids from hearing, and he's making me want to tear out my hair.

On a bad day, he runs around the classroom holding pencils, waving his lunchbox, pushing kids in the bathroom, hitting one of the eight-month-pregnant assistant teachers in her stomach, trying to escape the school grounds, smacking kids in the face with rulers, and kicking and biting me.

His parents keep saying, "We don't like to yell at him." It's not yelling he needs, it's help. Help that I can't give him. I don't even know where to start, because I don't know the underlying issue. And trying to figure out what that could be has been like trying to use webMD to discover the cause of a mysterious elbow pain. You come away thinking you have either an invisible bruise or joint cancer.
I've had everyone from other teachers, administrators, friends tell me to just ignore him. To put him out of the classroom. Now of course when he's violent, this is what happens. But since this is everyone else's attitude, I feel like who is going to help him if I don't.

Here's a kid who needs to be in the wading pool and this class has pushed him into the deep end without so much as floaties. I know I have a responsibility to the other 28 kids in the pool too, but that doesn't mean I want to watch him drown either.

His behavior has been in a downward spiral since Christmas, which is where my head's been at since. I've tried rewards, praise, stickers, being more forceful, modifying assignments by making them shorter, asking him to only answer 2 or 3 questions instead of 10, to only finish one page, anything I could think of I've tried. He's upset and frustrated too. I'm running out of ideas and not much is working. The only thing I've come across is that he likes Science class because it's hands on, so I bribe him with an extra science when the rest of the kids are doing writing or reading comprehension activities in the afternoons.

Any help?