It's no secret to the numerous reader of this blog that I have a daughter with 'special needs.' Yeah, it's not a txpo, I meant 'reader' (singular, not plural).
For the uninitiated (both of you), part of the indoctrination, err, education system in America is if you have a kid with special needs, there's a law referred to as IDEA, which basically puts the burden of evidence on public schools to justify every minute your kid is not part of the mainstream. On its surface, it's so logical it's hard to believe anyone had to make a law about it: a kid who needs speech therapy, it's spelled out on paper how much speech therapy the kid gets, when they get it and the parents, teachers, para-educators, therapists, etc., all get together and figure out how to get Johnny the speech therapy he needs without excluding him from the general indoctrin...education experience more than necessary.
I have personal experience with this, and imperfect as it is, it beats the shit out of what I remember from elementary school. The school I went to hadn't heard about IDEA (though it was passed in time they fucking well should have), and kids with learning disabilities from autism to MR to Down Syndrome to CP were all lumped into a group for official ostracization.
Anyway, participating in a mentoring program before my kiddos were even enrolled in my local school district, I saw The Box. This was a particle-board and 2x4 construction in the middle of the Behaviorally Disturbed room where out of hand kiddos could be put until they chilled out or the cops got there. Thanks to outraged parents (me included) it's been converted to a sensory room. First IEP meeting me and Frau Lobster attended we made it unambiguously clear that if we get wind that a kid of ours was put in that box, we'd be looking for the most vicious attorney we can find.
'Don't call it a box,' they begged, but we weren't having it, and its conversion makes me think we weren't alone in our view of the BOX. Box box box, can't quit saying box! BOX!!!
I'm not joking. The kid I played dodge ball with today is in eighth grade, and has assaulted (to my knowledge) three teachers, his grandmother (functionally his mother), and two cops, and is on probation for the most recent of these transgressions. I know, when I say he's basically a good kid, a lot of people have a gut reaction that I'm nuts to say that given the evidence. I've known this kid for almost seven years and I can say with a perfectly straight face that he's a basically good person and also that he's at least 85% likely to spend his adult life intimate with the American penal system. Because in addition to a couple of diagnosed disorders (and the educational setbacks they've resulted in), he's black, a fact which will soon trump his youth when he has occasion to interact with law enforcement.
That's a whole other discussion: the best man at my wedding is a cop, I have no notion that most cops aren't basically decent folks; at the same time I can't deny that the demographic profile of America's incarcerated population can only lead to a few conclusions. Since I reject the notion that black people are morally inferior (the KKK explanation), and can't accept 'poverty' as an excuse (the official Liberal position), I have to conclude that racial profiling by both cops and prosecutors amounts to a silent extension of Jim Crow.
How did I get this far a field? What I set out to blog about is who the hell I have to kill in this situation.
The people who would adopt eleven kids with special needs to keep them in boxes? Can I kill them? Please? Oh, wait, how about the prosecutors who have not brought these people up on the nastiest charges they can come up with? Can I kill the lazy DA types? Oh, what about the agency (or agencies) that placed these poor kids, who apparently don't screen well enough to tell a decent home from the People's Temple.
Just give me permission and a loaded gun, I'm ready to do my duty. Or fuck the gun, give me a baseball bat and let me beat them to death.
2 comments:
From what I hear the paperwork and legality to successfully adopt a child is pretty well-stacked. So how the hell does a couple manage to succeed in 11 children. One would think part of the paperwork/interview process would be, ‘Well, let’s check on how the children you have already adopted are doing’.
Unless there was some special of Adopt One, Get 10 Free.
(not to joke about the situation, but it’s just so foul that I have to add something to it otherwise I too would start thinking about slowly and painfully killing these people.)
“A night in the box” reminds me of Cool Hand Luke.
And even in Steve McQueen’s isolation cell he had enough room to throw a baseball off the wall.
Sick world...
!!!My disgust with people charged with overseeing the safety of our children, began when Savant was in the first grade. A kid he considered a friend, was holding a sharpened pencil, point up, on Savant's chair. Savant was standing up, concentrating on the activities at the table. The kid said "Sit down!", Savant thought he was saying it because he the teacher may have said it when he wasn't listening. So he automaticly sat down.
The pencil ripped through his jeans and into his rectum! The teacher did not tell anyone and sent him home on the bus, bleeding. When he got home he was crying and freaked out. I called the school and they said they didn't know anything about it. I rushed him to the doctor. What I should have done was call the police, but I didn't know that back then.
Basicly, no one took responsability. I called and wrote everyone I could think of and just got the run around.
The principal told me that parents think that the school staff are charged with the responability to keep their children safe while they are at school; but they aren't. They wouldn't even give me the names and phone number of the kid's parents.
This is getting long. I'll have to do a blog entry to do the whole story justice, but I was stunned by the total lack of concern for my son and the "rape" he experienced in elementery school. His definition of "friend", had a blank space next to it after that.
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