those kids

Snow Day Number Two is simultaneously occurring with the Betsy DeVos nomination for Secretary of Education. Because I am not working with my students today, I will take the opportunity to share with you why and how I do what I do professionally.

I am in Special Education. I've written (in fiction) about the type of kids I work with before in this blog. I haven't told you about the real students I work with. Part of this is due to privacy regulations and part of this is moral --their stories are not my stories, and they are not props.

What they may become, however, is collateral damage, if the DeVos nomination and what it stands for becomes reality. For this reason, it's time to share.

A portion of the students I have worked with over my fourteen years in education would have been institutionalized in an earlier time. When the phrase "Make America Great Again" was used during the campaign, the people who used it and the people who supported likely did not think back to the time when this was the case.

If a child was born with an obvious disability, it was only a matter of time before that child was taken from their family and placed in an institution, away from their family. To have a child remain at home with their family was the exception rather than the rule. With the passage of IDEA (that's federal special education law --Mrs. De Vos did not know about it), the country determined that, yes, kids with disabilities should also have access to an education, which institutions only provided in a perfunctory way. The assumption was made that "those kids" don't learn. They were treated that way, and they didn't.

I'm here to tell you they can and do learn. The majority of the students I work with will not go to college (this is based on the nature of their disabilities), but they absolutely can learn.

A portion of these students use aggression as communication when I begin working with them. These are 'those kids' --the ones who bite, kick, throw things, spit, hit, choke, run away, scream, etc. These students are the same ones who love Dora the Explorer and Disney movies and want to figure out how toilets work and how spiders build webs. In short, they are complex little people. 

When they get to school, they haven't figured out yet how to navigate the world. But if a school requires them to already have these skills in order to attend, how can they get in to be able to learn the skills?

My job in the public schools is to teach them to communicate using socially-acceptable means, ideally words and language. I am part of a team. We each take an area of specialization, and we work to figure out how to help these kids grow and achieve their potential (because they do have potential, the same as anyone else). They do learn, given access to adequate support and well-trained staff. This access should not depend on the family's ability to pay for the service. 

Society benefits when you don't have people wasting away in institutions (and not knocking staff there because they are underfunded --that's why they are the way they are). 

Society benefits when you teach children means other than aggression to get their needs met rather than incarcerating them when they're older. 

Society benefits when children with disabilities are given the benefit of the doubt because there is all kinds of potential there.

And this is why, moving forward, I hope we realize what benefit there is to all of us when all children are provided access to an education. I hope our leadership moving forward recognizes this. "Those kids" are all of ours.

[Update: The vote was just taken, and I guess America doesn't feel the way I do, according to 50 Senators and the Vice President. Please continue to include people with disabilities in the wider community and volunteer at your local public school or donate materials.]