I came across this article yesterday on Yahoo. I'm sure many of you did, if you didn't, the link is below.
I'm wondering how many people were shocked and appalled? It saddens me to say that I was not shocked by one thing that was brought forward by this article and Mr. Chaifetz's video.
I have my own stories about the education system and the treatment of my son. Not all of my son's experiences in the special education system were positive. If they were he wouldn't be finishing out his high school years at home with me. If I'd more clearly understood the process maybe I would have done things differently or him. I don't mean the IEP process. I mean the process at which IEP team members work together to point the finger at my child for his failure to progress with their assigned goals. I will say that I didn't feel that educating my son was of interest to many of the educators who participated on his IEP team. I can count on one hand the number of individuals who actually believed in my son's potential and wanted him to be his best. He had been in the education system from the time he was four years old until he was placed at home for health reasons at the age of fifteen.
When my son was seven, the district assigned him a new health aid. They reassigned the the aid that was with him by saying she really wasn't qualified to meet his health needs. She was attentive to detail and she cared about my son. The new aid talked negatively in front of my son about me and his health needs. She continually remarked to our part-time nurse, who went to school with him, that I was over-protective and she didn't need help transferring him. She was overly confident and disregarded many, if not all of my concerns, regarding the care she provided my son during his school day. My internal bells and whistles begin going off. Between the nurse's reports and my gut feeling I was beginning to worry. Yet, I didn't have enough sense to call an IEP. I was stupid.
Fast forward to a phone call I get from the aide. She said something happened to F's leg while she was moving him. She thinks his hip popped out of socket (since his hips are dislocated). I immediately go to the school I transfer him out of his chair. He's shrieking in agony and pain. I discover his left thigh is so swollen. I contact the doctor's office. They send me with him immediately to the ER. Upon evaluation we are told his femur is FRACTURED!. He's in so much pain. They medicate him and send him to x-ray. What I see on that x-ray makes me sick to my stomach. Not only is his femur fractured it's broken into two pieces sitting side by side. It was like a horror movie x-ray to me. The doctor's cannot set his femur due to the cerebral palsy. They give us scripts for pain meds. Tell us to move him every hour . They give us a foam pad and a strap to stabilize his leg to cut down on it's movement. He's at risk for blood clots, pneumonia, and skin break down. My heart is broken, so is my husband's. We are FURIOUS!!!
To this day I often think about this injury and what that was like for him. Unable to speak to get the aide's attention. Although, I have my doubts that she would have noticed anything that he said if he could speak. When I do think of it I feel sick and emotional. F and I do not talk about this accident. I can't even imagine what this nightmare must have been like. His communication skills are improved enough that we could likely isolate what occurred, but I don't. Some things are just better being left unknown.
In a nutshell, we never find out what really happened to F's leg. We suspect that when the aide had him in a stander she forgot to unstrap either his knee or ankle, possibly both, and moved him alone. Pulling on him with such force to remove him from the equipment that she snapped the largest bone in his body. My son suffered physically and emotionally from this experience. He's unable to speak and he was terrified of new nurses of returning to school, of being transferred to and from equipment. It felt like an eternity for him to recover emotionally enough to return to his full-inclusion class.
The aide still has her job. My son encountered this aide above five years later in a summer program. He showed up at school, heard her voice and become emotionally hysterical. His current aide at the time called me to tell me he was crying uncontrollable and she'd never seen him this way. She couldn't calm him down. I went to pick him up walked in the class saw the aide who broke his leg and knew what he was upset about. I called the supervisor and you know what her attitude was? It's been long enough it's time for us to get over it. REALLY? Your going to tell a child who was severely injured and traumatized that it's been long enough get over it?
And yet I continued to send my son to school year after year... until I got smart. I look back now on my son's emotional state through his last years in a special day class for the severely disabled. He was withdrawn, depressed, emotional. I can't help but wonder what happened in that classroom. I will never know. It's taken a good two years of being at home working with individuals who treat him with love, respect and dignity, as all human beings should be treated, for him to return to us.
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