Many, the
school had all sorts of really tantalizing
facilities. They had a warm water pool and
they had all sorts of adults who would be
there, you know what the people in the administration
would say, you can't this kind of staff ratio
any where else. We take care of these kids,
and basically the message was your going to
be a bad parent if you force him to go to
a regular school. And it took... it took more
than just meetings and talking. What was really
interesting was that there was a group that
was providing respit care for families on
the weekend, it was based in a church, and
so my kids, I have two sons, and the youngest
one is the one who has the disability, they
would go there and one of the women running
the respit group said "you know, we could
have your kids come to sunday school" and
so it was these two sunday school teachers
who went with us to meetings at the segregated
school. And they just did it, they did not
have any instruction on how to include kids,
they just automatically knew it was the right
thing to do. And so it was people like that
who helped us argue our way out and finally
free him from that horrible place. But it
also went into mediation, and we ended up
moving out of that district, and this is for
a kindergardener, it was just amazing that
a guy like that could be presenting such trouble
to people. So we moved to a district that
at the time was making sure that all the kids
with disabilities were going to their neighborhood
schools and unfortunately that did not last
more than a couple of years, but in the time
we took advantage of that, we just made sure
that he was going to his neighborhood school
and having his little special stuff done as
much as possible. Besides, you know fighting
all the way through every single grade almost
daily to make sure that they were doing a
good job including him and giving him access
to the curriculum and not doing special things.
He learned about facilitated communication,
when it started the two special Ed. teachers,
the speech therapist and his dad and I all
went to learn about it and when he was probably
seven years old he began to have a way to
express his ideas, and even though I thought
I was giving him lots of credit I had no idea
how much he was learning and picking up and
how much he knew. So, since then he has been
developing his own idea of how to be an activist
on his own behave and its been... as people
kinda warn me and i guess i didn't end up
being true. As kids get older in high school
the educators think, well it worked fine in
elementary school but we're not going to have
to do it here, it just does not work, but
he's kinda carried the load more and more.
Right now he's at the University of Colorado
in Denver. He's been there for a couple of
years taking a couple of classes a semester
and still facing discrimination, only this
time he is able to do as much advocacy for
himself as I am, which is just fantastic.
