 Every child who gets their educational needs met is a success story, because they can now be what they came here to be. However, sometimes there are stories that stand out and make you sit back and shake your head wondering how this can happen to a child or a young adult. We chose to tell you the success stories so that you come from this section with a sense of inspiration, and hopefully you will be inspired to make a difference in a child’s life or even refer a struggling student to our organization so that we can make a difference for yet another.
In 2005, we were called by a frustrated and angry mother whose son had been suspended over thirty days so far in that school year. He would be in the classroom and because he was different than the typical child, he was targeted for suspension by his teachers. I’m going to call him Tim for the purposes of this story. What do I mean by different? He was antisocial, except to a very few friends. Would never raise his hand and when called on, sometimes wouldn’t respond, or didn’t have the correct answer. The teachers were frustrated, blamed him for lack of motivation and therefore didn’t want him in their classrooms. They would make remarks to Tim about his lack of work ethic, and Tim would make remarks back to them, so they would remove him from the classroom for insubordination. He failed the eighth grade and did not pass the MCAS test.
Well, for those of you who understand how the “School to Prison Pipeline” works, if you have a lot of suspensions, you are sent to court as a “habitual offender” and threatened with removal from your home if you don’t stop being suspended. His mother found us because she had just gotten out of court for the second time and was literally told that if she can’t control her son’s behavior and make him comply with the demands of school, the judge was going to take her son away from her. She had no idea what to do. She had requested testing from the school and Tim was found to have no special needs. She got an independent evaluation, and still the school saw no reason for any help.
When she found us, we assessed his records to understand everything about Tim so that we could answer the question, “WHY”. That is the million dollar question for all of our cases. We believe that if you can answer “why”, then the how, who, what, when, and where answers will fall into place. To their defense, teachers don’t have the time, were over-worked and underpaid, administrators had so many children to deal with, they didn’t take the time, and so we were called in to help the team make informed decisions.
After reading everything in Tim’s file, we came to the conclusion that Tim had a Nonverbal Learning Disability (NVLD). His IQ score discrepancy was statistically significant between his verbal, and perceptual reasoning. He also had a discrepancy with his working memory (auditory). He was disorganized, and got overwhelmed when he had a long term assignment, written expression and math were difficult for him, and so he would shut down and not do it. When teachers would chastise him for not doing his work well enough, he would shut down or speak to them disrespectfully, but to his defense, they were being disrespectful to him first. Today’s children are not like yesterday’s children. They don’t respect their elders unless their elders respect them.
So together with one of our consultants, Tim’s mother was armed with the knowledge that allowed her to get her son on an Individual Education Program (IEP). It was still a struggle, however, because the school personnel would not concede that Tim had NVLD, they believed he had an emotional disability and unlawfully diagnosed him with “Narcissistic Personality Disorder”, however, we taught Tim’s mother that the district had no credentials to diagnose her son and did not accept him being put into a substantially separate program for students with emotional impairment.
Five years later, after many IEP meetings to right the wrongs perpetrated on this wonderful young adult, Tim is graduating in the class of 2010! He has been exceptional through all of this and has never lost his voice. He now speaks against injustice and advocates for himself and others. He has learned how best to organize himself, and strategies for remembering things that before were difficult for him. His vision for his future looks bright because he just signed a deal with a record label for his band to record, his band has been performing around MA, and he has aspirations of going to Berkley School of Music in Boston beginning in 2011 after taking a well deserved year off from school to “decompress”.
SAVE THE CHILDREN
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