My State in a Michigan School District

Yesterday, the school I work at was on lockdown. Some kid had a gun. Lots of police. We had to stay in our classrooms with the doors locked, and keep the kids away from the windows. As soon as the buses could get there we escorted the students to the buses, then we were ordered to leave campus ourselves as soon as we could.

Guess nobody got hurt, since NOTHING was on the news, on the Internet, or in the newspaper. And nothing was said about the lockdown today at the school. Seriously, nothing. We all moved on with our lives and lesson plans—myself included.

I was anxious to dive back into our lessons for “Women’s History Month” and “National Reading Month.” I’ve been reading the book Cleopatra’s Daughter to my students, connecting it to all of the core subjects. We’re getting to a really, really good part of the book….. And then, the classroom phone rings.

I’m called down to the office like a truant student to talk to the school psychologist, my department head, and the district’s director of special education. Apparently, I fucked up.

Wide eyed and a little pissed off (I should have been teaching), I waited for it. Right before the tongue lashing began, I realized what the topic was going to be. Last week I’d had a contentious IEP meeting about one of my students. The only person in disagreement with the team recommendations was the school psychologist. She was firm in her disagreement. My student’s mother was equally disgusted by the psychologist’s reasoning.

Most of the IEP team wanted to place the student in 8th grade in my class for a second year. He was showing promising, and sudden progress since I had taken over the classroom. For the previous two years his classes had been with a substitute teacher, who was not certified as a teacher in any subject. Additionally, it was found that he was severely visually impaired enough to be considered legally blind. We were just now figuring out how to effectively teach him, and how he could show us what he knows.

The school psychologist, however, was adamant about two things. First, intelligence was a fixed quotient that she could accurately measure with a standardized test. She whipped out her diagram of the IQ Bell Curve. Pointing to the area in the middle, she said, “This is where normal people are. According to the tests he’s been given since elementary school, this is where he is,” and she pointed to the far left tail of the Bell Curve. The student’s mother visibly bristled at this definitive declaration of “Your son is here.”

The meeting concluded with the decision that these concerns would be addressed during an additional “move up” IEP to determine where the student would be placed the following school year. The school psychologist left. The ancillary staff left. The parent remained purposefully at the table waiting to talk to me. I told her that I wanted to make sure that I had her “parent concerns” accurately recorded, and I turned my laptop over to her to type these in herself. When she was done, she asked me what I thought about the psychologist’s assessment of her son.

I answered that I honestly did not agree with the psychologist’s view that her son’s abilities were predetermined and limited. She shared that she was concerned that having an unqualified teacher had impeded his progress. She asked me if I knew that the previous teacher wasn’t even a certified teacher. I told her the truth. She asked me if I thought this might have affected her son’s performance on the most recent standardized tests. I told her the truth.

A very, very, wise professor told me something I didn’t really quite get until I started teaching myself: “Every day you’re doing the right thing is a day you might get fired. If you’re doing the right thing you’ll go to work wondering if you still have a job.” Well, fuck.

Labels and Rights

I teach teenaged students who have significant disabilities. They are all labeled as having "severe cognitive impairment" (SCI). This does not, however, mean that they do not learn or that they are not capable of achieving academic gains. It unfortunately can mean that academic learning and independence skills are not high priorities. Staff, parents, (and even the students themselves) see independence or academic success as unattainable, unrealistic goals.

One of my students (who I will call Katja) stands out as an exceptionally smart, beautiful, capable, and interesting young lady who would be seen as a person with unlimited potential-- if not for her disability labels. Due to developmental delay and mental illness, she has been institutionalized at different times during her pre-teen and teen years. Now seventeen years old, many labels have been put into her 1/2 foot-thick paper file: Aspergers, autism, cognitive impairment, emotional impairment, schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar mood disorder, attention deficit. By definition, it is not possible for her to have all of these conditions, since some of these diagnoses preclude the possibility of some of the others. This disabling litany does not describe Katja the person.

Over the past year-and-a-half, Katja has made stunning progress socially and academically. She has steadily increased her measured reading skills from below pre-K to around a 3rd grade level. Put concretely, she has gone from only being able to identify most of the letters in the alphabet to being able to read phonetically with 80% accuracy and able to identify over 200 sight words. In terms of "mental years" that's an improvement of six years. And she continues to improve her skills at a high rate. Social/emotional improvement has been evident in her improved ability to communicate her feelings without "melting down." She shows empathetic interest in the feelings and well being of her classmates and staff. For over a year now, she has not demonstrated any behaviors at school that could be considered harmful to herself or others.

I cannot express how proud I am of her and and how hard she has worked to overcome learning disabilities, fine motor impairments, phobias, and hallucinations. In short, she is simply amazing. And for the past several months I have advocated for her educational rights with the same passion I would for my own daughter. It never, ever, crossed my mind that Katja wouldn't even get a chance to live at least semi-independently. Until today.

Katja's mother called to talk to me about getting paperwork for guardianship started. Her 18th birthday isn't until May. I suggested that she might want to look at their legal rights between now and then, because there are some potentially negative consequences for a person becoming the subject of "guardianship." In worst case scenarios, courts have the right to assign ANYONE to be the person's guardian after the original guardianship request has been granted. So, bluntly, when the parent/caregiver dies, there is nothing set in place to transfer guardianship to someone who actually cares about or even knows the client. Katja's mother was quite frank in telling me that she didn't care about any of that. She planned to put Katja in a group home as soon as possible. The only reason she cared about guardianship was to have a legal right to visit with her daughter when she wanted to.

I listened and remembered the facts,

• I don't know what Katja and her mother go through at home.
• I don't have a right to care.
• I don't have a right to have an opinion.
• I don't have a right to give an opinion.
• It's my job to provide whatever help and documentation the parent wants to implement plans for her child.

I listened. I met with the school psychologist. The school psychologist called mom to talk about and schedule what evaluations needed to be done before a guardianship hearing.

Then I cried all the way home from work.