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We're moving next year. Just for the year while Peter goes back to school. But it still means packing our things and finding new doctors and new friends and, most worrisome to me, a new school for Penny.
So I went online and looked at the website for the school system where we'll be living. Here's what I found:
I suddenly couldn't get quite enough air. It wasn't what I read. It was the sentence that never made it into the paragraph. It was the absence of, Children with special needs make valuable contributions to their typically developing peers, particularly through...
Particularly through what exactly? I wouldn't want to say through compassion and kindness and patience, as if every kid with special needs is a poster child of sweetness and light. So what is it? Through breaking down stereotypes before they even begin? Through demonstrating to everyone (adults and kids alike) that they are more similar than different?
It can't really be summed up in words as specific as "language and social skills", but I think what I would want to write is, particularly through friendship.
I don't know whether this statement on the website reflects anything about the school itself. I just know that I want Penny to benefit from her typically developing peers, and I want them to benefit from her as well. I want her to grow up in a matrix of reciprocal relationships, in which she knows what it is to give and to receive. And I--a typically developing adult--want to learn to see my peers with special needs as individuals who have gifts to give me.
I hope I'll report back a year for now with stories of the friends Penny has made at her new school. I hope she'll be going to birthday parties and having playdates and telling me the names of her friends. And I hope she won't have any idea which ones of those friends fall into the category of special and typical. I hope she'll just know they are her friends.
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4 comments:
I totally understand your frustration with semantics, but just to encourage you: who knows who wrote that description. Could have been a program office assistant, for all you know. Penny's experience will be dictated by the people in her classroom and your involvement. I hope for all of you it will be a good one.
Ugh. I'm so sorry. As if there weren't enough things to worry about with a big move. Hopefully you and Penny will change some hearts.
As a writer, I care about the power of words and completely understand your frustration here. It is a clear oversight not to mention the mutuality of learning.
But as a mom whose physically disabled daughter attended this type of preschool, I can see some other ways of looking at it too. The "role model" idea is integral to these preschools. In our town, for example, the typically developing students must be 3 before the school year starts (whereas at most preschools in CT, they have to be 3 by December 31, so they can start preschool at 2 3/4). This is precisely because they want the typically developing kids to be as mature as possible to serve as role models. The idea is that a child with significant speech delays, for example, might be much more motivated to attempt speech when he sees his school friends talking than when his speech therapist is doing exercises with him. They also mix ages, so each class will have kids ages 3 to 5, for the same reason. It's not just for the kids with special needs, either--a typically developing 3 year old will look at the 4 1/2 or 5 year olds as role models as well.
The teachers (and many of the parents) understand that it is not a one-way street and that the typically developing kids and the kids with developmental delays are there for the same reasons--to learn, to socialize, to learn empathy and cooperation and all the other things that are vital for any preschool program. I found that many (not all) of the parents of typically developing kids in Leah's classes chose our preschool precisely because they wanted their kids to have that mutual relationship with kids who are not typical. They wanted their kids to be in a classroom with seven or eight kids with a variety of conditions because they understood the value of that for their own children.
Who knows how exactly this particular school will be, but our experience with an integrated preschool was 100% fantastic--and my friends whose kids attended the same school but did not have any special needs feel the same way. And the teachers were absolutely amazing! I hope you find the same!
Thanks, all, for your sympathy and encouragement. I do have to keep reminding myself that Penny has always been her own best advocate. I've been worried about every transition--into her first day care situation, then into preschool, from one Sunday school class to the next--and they have been great all around. But I also hope that we can (graciously) get that website wording changed before the end of next year!
Amy Julia
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