there is this link:
A weekend interview with ...#more
For those of you who don't have a clue of how I got where I am, I will use some quotes from this article and then make comments about my personal experience while my son was in school. I noticed that my anger is not as intense towards the system that it used to be. Maybe my blogging is helping. Thanks to Goader for his part in this sequence of my life.
First let me say again that my son had several good educational settings. Despite what I have been accused of, I am not making broad brush accusations. I once used the analogy that even though 19 nurses do a great job of taking care of a patient, if one or two nurses kill the patient, the family usually doesn't celebrate the good nurses while they are pissed as hell. Nor do they care about the statistics used to demonstrate that it was an isolated incident. Add to this the angst they have when they later learn that it isn't an isolated incident.
I have as much greatfulness for the many that went far and above their professional duties as I have anger towards the liars and non-professional arrogant ones. Everytime we were in a bad spot, we tried everything we knew to bring in resources and help for the setting. That didn't set well with some.
Here are the quotes and my comments:
"Well, I went to Washington ..." - yep, have done that too. I didn't testify, but I did talk to two congressmen.
"They used to drag his desk out in the hall and leave him by himself."
- In my case, in one setting, they put my son's desk in a corner of the room with partitions around him so no one else could see him.
"My son's behaviors started changing. His personality started changing. ... He went from a happy little boy to a very unhappy, angry little boy and I didn't know what was going on. That happened over a period of time, like about one year."
- In my case, these changes started showing within months.
"and he was put on some medication to help with his anxiety, aggression, depression, which he had never had before."
"Is that when you became an advocate, or an activist?"
- Yep. The school system creates parents like us.
" He didn't want to go to school. He would cry in the morning .."
- He usually perked up when I was at his school setting. There was at least one school setting where things were not going well that when my wife and I drove him there for what turned out to be the last meeting held at that school, he absolutely fought to not get out of the van.
"He would cry all the time. He would throw tantrums."
- We learned in times of stress, Phillip would shred his clothes, chew his cuticles and pick his skin until it bled. It became evident over the years this was a good clue, because these behaviors did not exist at the school that was always his "safe-haven". To add to the flavor of my history, after I wrote my first serious letter of complaint in the fall of 1996, we recieved a formal letter that stated Phillip could not go to school because of the blood borne pathogens problem. That was just one of a few of the strategies that were thrown at us because we complained.
" I didn't know what was going on. His verbalization was not good. He has very poor expressive language. ... "
- I think I made the point before that Phillip can't talk and can't hear at all.
"Is that the case with most parents, that they don't know about this?"
"I am guessing that a lot of parents don't know about it."
- yep
"Because I decided that something needed to be done. But the district was trying to tell me that my situation was isolated. And I just thought, how can that be?"
- When the STAND advocacy started in 1997, within a couple of years we had between 600 -700 contacts.
"It's astounding. Parents come from all over. Not just Florida. So they had been working on this issue anyway. This just gave them reason to push it further."
" And I hear the same story from other parents. Usually when parents call me, I don't tell them my story. I listen to what they tell me because they want to unload their story and talk to somebody. And I am just hearing the same story over and over and over. ..."
- I have been there and done that.
"The problem is, sometimes the schools are not honest with you and don't tell you these things. And that's not right. Parents have a right to know."
- I guess I am not an isolated incident afterall.
"Sometimes, if it's not happening to you, No. 1, it's not a problem. And No. 2, who's going to believe a crazy story like that? ..."
- There was a period of time where I doubted myself. How could those professionals just flat out lie like they did?
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment