This is part four of a multi-part series about one father’s account of working with the dysfunctional special education system. (Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, & Part 3 here.
In part two of this series I shared a very private and painful experience when the school psychologist diagnosed my daughter as mentally retarded (MR), later relabeled by the Federal government as Intellectual Disability (ID). That diagnosis turned out to be incorrect (it should have been Speech and Language Impairment) but we had to live with it for three years and still struggle to explain to people what makes our daughter different.
Unlike having a diagnosis such as Autism, making fun of people who are not “smart” is socially acceptable, even expected. Think of all those blonde jokes. What do you say about people behind their back who aren’t the “sharpest tool in the shed”? Remember those people who were made fun of for being special ed.? It’s like we think they are responsible for it, that they didn’t study enough in school or smoked too much weed.
Well these are the things you think about when your child has an Intellectual Disability. You don’t want your child stigmatized by others, so you don’t want to talk about it. You walk around with a hundred-pound weight on your shoulders. You’re not sure how to address it with people. You hope other people won’t notice, but deep down you know they will.
Most parents I know are comfortable sharing their child has autism, ADHD, dyslexia, or any number of other disabilities. On the other hand, many people bury kids with low IQ’s.
It’s like in the movie X-Men where kids with exceptional powers had to live in a special community, isolated from their peers, to be with “their own kind.” Our principal wanted to kick our daughter out of the school and told the IEP team she would never graduate from high school. The IEP team wanted to put her on an education track that teaches life skills instead of academics. A child psychologist we took our daughter to said she would never read above a fifth-grade level and suggested we enroll her in special Olympics to get to know kids like herself. He also suggested we set up a trust to take care of her for the rest of her life. This was in second-grade and the experts had already planned her entire life.
Don’t we teach kids to not let others limit them? Don’t we celebrate people who overcome adversity and achieve great things? It’s a good thing Temple Grandin and Helen Keller never accepted their limitations.
One danger in listening to the experts is they make mistakes. Our daughter’s initial assessment showed an IQ below 60. Nobody could get past that number. Teachers and administrators judged her to be incapable. An expert told me IQ scores never change and is an infallible indicator of future success. I pushed back that there must certainly be exceptions, but I was told, no, she would never rise above a fifth-grade level.
Well three years later she took an IQ test again (assessments occur every three years through high school graduation) and scored well above 80. Based on that and other factors her diagnosis was changed to Specific Learning Disability. Unfortunately, the IEP team never changed their original opinion that she was incapable and we continued to fight the same nonsense as before.
In eighth-grade she scored even higher and her diagnosis was changed again to Speech and Language Impairment.
We never did put her in special Olympics or integrate her with “her own kind.” She participated in soccer at the YMCA like everyone else. She made the freshman gymnastics team. She attends a regular high school. She does attend lower level classes in math, English, and social studies, and receives extra time to take some tests, but she’s not treated like she’s incapable.
What have I learned from all this? Let your child define their own path. My daughter has never self-identified as a special education student. In fact, she gets angry talking about some of the classes she was forced to attend in elementary school. She thinks it’s unfair she was forced to work on her times table when everyone else was learning long-division. She resents she was treated different by her teachers.
Once she hit middle school in seventh grade, things became much better. Her self-esteem improved. She felt more like other children. She still struggles, but she believes she is going to college. She is working to get a driver’s license.
I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know she is going to pursue her dreams, not the path charted by some self-serving administrators in the second grade.
Signed,
Parent of San Diego County teenagers
