3 Happy Hour

Inside Special Education by Kenneth W. Howell

“We can’t get our skills and our hearts working at the same time.”

Topic Overview:

· Getting into Special Education

· Teacher Training

· War Stories

· Moderate Retardation

· Learning Disabilities

· Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

· Sex and Sexuality

· Parents

· The Ethics of Behavior Management

The three of us sit around the same half-circle booth repeated in every highway restaurant in every town. It is Friday and even though none of us has worked that day, we are in the kind of after-hours mood that overtakes a lot of teachers on Friday nights. It is happy hour. On the tape, our conversation barely overcomes the clatter of voices and the general noise of dishes, glasses, and changing seats. Kathi and Karen alternate glasses of wine and beer as the conversation moves past recent gossip and on into the topics of this book

We are old friends (and Kathi, I believe, is the oldest), but we have gone in very different directions. Kathi is briefly home from Germany where she teaches moderately retarded students at a military base. Her voice is quick to take on low and serious tones. Her appearance is striking, for although she’s sick of hearing about it, her eyes are two different colors and her hair, once- prematurely grey, is now a kind of fluid blend of silver and black She leans forward when she speaks and retreats when she is finished. Her laughter is high and pleasant.

Karen is equally sick of being described as short. She most often has the lounging demeanor of a sun-warmed lizard. She was recently a resource/consultant (itinerant teacher) in Bellingham, Washington. Her job, however, has been eradicated by funding cuts. She is thin with expressive eyes and a general look of ease. She tends to lean on the table and stay in one place. Her voice giggles and then sours, giving a clear indication of her mood. She thinks quickly and speaks bluntly.

In general, Karen seems the intellectual while Kathi appears the captive of emotion. Both of their conversations are riddled with private jokes, peculiarly accented phrases, and unnerving honesty. They are both competent and experienced teachers.

The conversation begins with backgrounds as Karen explains her arrival in the field of special education. “I always swore I would never teach, so I had to keep switching my major because I could only be in English for so long,” she explains. “Pretty soon you knew English lit., and knew you were going to graduate some day, and what else can you do with English lit. but teach? Then I had to get out of sociology because it was the same thing. Plus, I didn’t want to take statistics.” Kathi laughs in agreement with Karen’s explanation. “So, I was thumbing through the catalog one day and I saw this class called MR 312 or something and I thought it sounded interesting and I got sucked in. . . . He was the worst lecturer in the world.”

“So why did you stay in?” Kathi asks.

“Because I thought the topic was interesting--I really did. I liked all that old clinical and chromosome stuff; Strange and bizarre names and tenets.” She repeats a few (Microcephaly, Cri du Chat Syndrome) obviously enjoying their sound. “How can you resist all that stuff?”

Kathi explains self-consciously, “I got into special ed. for altruistic reasons. I really felt like I should do something to help society. Let’s see, I started out in interior design and then. . .”

“That would be a help in here.”

“Somebody has to help the rich, you know,” Kathi says, acknowledging my quip. “I didn’t like that, so I knew I was going to have to switch out. Then I got engaged and he decided that I had to work so we could get married. I was working at a bank. I worked in a lot of different departments in the bank. It was okay until I’d learned each job, but then it got boring.” She pauses and her voice briefly takes on serious tones. “Then, it was like a moral or philosophical thing with me. I believed that everybody should do something to help somebody else. But I never did anything.

“Later when I came to Arizona (on the run from the engagement), my parents said, ‘If you really feel that way, there’s a school for problem kids down the street,’ and at that time, they hired people without degrees. They said, ‘Why don’t you go and check it out?’ “

“I probably never would have gotten into it or stayed in it if I’d needed a degree in order to work,” I comment. (NOTE 1)

“I don’t think I would have either,” Kathi replies.

“It was like I worked and then I got-”

“Got around to getting a degree,” Karen finishes my sentence.

“Yes,” Kathi says. “I got my degree to make more money and also because I knew there was some stuff I didn’t know.”

“I guess I was always going to get a college education,” I begin. “But I changed schools and majors. It was a big relief when I finally found something I cared about. Then I was getting all A’s and I used to go around saying, ‘See, when I’m really interested in something I can get good grades.’ I didn’t realize that “80% percent of the grades given in the ed. department were A’s.”

“Right,” Karen affirms. “If you could make a puppet you’d get an A. I remember when I switched from MR [Mental Retardation] to EBD [Emotional or Behavioral Disorder]. I thought that was my interest. But it was a really big deal and two of my profs had this argument that one had lured me away from MR, which was the ‘real’ special ed. (NOTE 2)

“I always felt a little inferior because I was in LD [Learning Disability],” I admit “I always thought you guys looked down at me.”

‘‘Well, we did.”

“I was really in all three of them,” Kathi says. “I graduated with majors in all of them. I did double internships in all the coursework. But EBD, I knew I’d never do that I don’t enjoy that at all.”

“That’s the best!” Karen proclaims.

“I’m terrified.”

“Of the wackos?” Karen asks.

“I’m not good in a crisis situation and working with EBD kids is just one crisis after another. For someone who’s tense and can’t think in a crisis, it’s not a good field. I wouldn’t enjoy the turmoil at all,” Kathi concludes.

“I’m great in a crisis,” I state. They look at me suspiciously. “No, I frequently create them just so I can look good.”

“I’m pretty good, too”, Karen agrees. “When shit happens often enough you don’t have to think about it to fix it.”

“Not me,” Kathi shakes her head.

“I can deal with violence and all that. I get ‘the shakes’ afterwards, but I’m fine at the time,” Karen elaborates. “I don’t get angry at the kids.”

“Fine, you guys can assume total responsibility if anything happens tonight,” Kathi mocks. “Okay.”

The waitress brings our food and we shuffle our conversation with french fries.

‘‘Well,’’ I say, “what I originally wanted to do was take a psychology course, and I couldn’t get in. So, the closest thing I could get was-”

“Was special ed.?” Karen completes another sentence.

“Un huh.”

“And it was a lot easier to get a job then too!” Kathi recalls. “The range of job choices is smaller now and that’s kind of a sad thing in a way. I mean I’m glad to see that all these private schools are being closed down because the districts are taking over. (NOTE 3) But, on the other hand, it is sad because we did have a chance in the past to find out if we liked special ed. or if we were good at working with the kids. We had experience by the time we got out of school.”

“The thing is,” I confess, “I hated education.”

They both nod in recognition of what I’m saying.

“So, I really loved special ed. because I saw it as counter-education, an alternative. It seemed like a big protest to be in special ed. I thought the reason we had to have special ed. was because regular education was so awful. That’s why special ed. had so much appeal. But, now, what’s happened is that special ed. is more institutionalized and formalized than regular ed. It certainly has more rules and regulations and paper-work.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“Much more.”

‘‘Yes. I guess that’s part of the reason Sped was more appealing,” Karen considers, “although for me it was real intellectual the first couple of years. The classes were fun. And the department was small and I didn’t feel so lost in a big university and all that business.

“Transferring. I had the same things. I hated education. I hated teachers. I swore I would never teach so I wouldn’t have to deal with kids like me. I was such a brat in school.”

Kathi swallows. “I loved school. I have always loved school. It’s always, been a positive thing for me. I think it was when I was getting my master’s in special ed. that I started realizing what a game it was. When I saw some of the assholes that become teachers,” she pronounces “assholes” in a way that makes you believe that’s exactly what she thinks of those long-gone teacher-training students, “passing and going out into the world with a master’s. I’d loved school until then-and probably still do.”

“Oh, I liked it. All my friends were there. Besides, if you don’t go to school, what do you do?” Karen asks. “The first thing I learned in grade school was how far I could push without my parents getting called. So, that was the game. Figure out each teacher and figure out exactly what I had to do and what I could get away with.”

“Not me. I was a good little girl and I didn’t discover until my second master’s that you didn’t have to study to get good grades. I always worked real hard. I thought that I had to do that.”

“Slow learner.”

“I met this woman at a workshop in Germany and it turned out that she was a teacher and there were other people there who were counselors and she was joking around and asking them what they did. When she found out that certain people were teachers, she was analyzing them and asking them what they taught. She was saying that she could tell all this stuff about them because people always taught things for reasons of their own, something to do with themselves. So I started saying, ‘My God, I’m teaching moderately retarded kids. What in the world does that mean?’ She said that it probably did have something to do with my past.” Kathi reflects. “I think it did. When I was a little kid, I felt rejected and I think I always wanted to pick up little animals and take care of them and all that kind of stuff. Teaching and nursing were the things I used to think about when I was a little kid. But, I think it was something that I wanted done to me. I think that’s the reason I used to do that as a little kid and the reason I do it now. Maybe she’s right. Maybe that is why I went into special ed.”

“Becoming a teacher was the farthest thing from my mind until the day I became one,” I remark while discarding a questionable portion of my cheeseburger. “I don’t think anyone I ever knew would have thought I would be a teacher.”

‘‘Yes, I always think that, too. If I were to run into people I went to high school with they would probably just die if they thought I became a teacher.”

“Not my friends. They’d say, ‘That’s just like Kathi.’ ‘‘

“You’re so predictable.”

“Really?”

“When I was in school I thought everyone else went into special ed. for altruistic reasons,” I recall. “I felt kind of guilty.”

“I saw a thing in a journal,” recalls Karen. “Someone was saying that some special ed. teachers model themselves after their kids and tend to see themselves as different from regular classroom teachers, that they tend to isolate themselves from general classroom teachers and develop bizarre behaviors like the kids.”

“I believe that.” I said, “ I went into special ed. because I didn’t want to be a regular ed. teacher. So mainstreaming was a big pain in the ass to me. Who wants to mainstream a kid? I don’t like regular education. It was regular education that hurt the kid in the first place!”

Kathi picks up that thought. “There was a time when I thought I was burning out and saying that I really wanted to give it up and it was really driving me crazy. Someone said, ‘Why don’t you think about going into regular ed.?’ and I just thought, ‘No way.’”.

“Realizing that really upset me.” She continued, “I realized then that I was drawn to special ed because it was different. That was a big thing with me. I wouldn’t want to just sit in class. In my mind, there’s some sort of a status to special ed. I’d much rather say I teach special ed. than say I am a regular teacher. I don’t know. Maybe that’s real warped.”

“Lots of people got in because their little brother was retarded or they were handicapped in some way themselves or someone in the family was,” Karen suggests. “I don’t think I ever knew anyone who had a disability when I was a kid.”

“I didn’t either,” Kathi adds. “I never even saw a kid with a disability when I was in grade school. I do remember on the playground at school, though. They had kids down in the basement for the special ed. class, and there were bars on the windows, seriously. I remember they weren’t out on the playground the same time as we were and I remember pointing to those windows with the bars on them and saying, ‘That’s where the retarded kids are.’ I don’t know whether that’s a true memory or not, but I do have that memory. I could have made it up.”

Karen considers some people in the restaurant and seems ill at ease with all this retrospect. “Well, there were some special ed. kids when I was in junior high. I remember feeling just horrible because some kids gave one of them Ex-Lax and told him it was a candy bar. I didn’t do anything about it and I remember feeling just awful. I didn’t want to be involved and maybe have to touch him or something because he was retarded.” She pauses. “Another funny special ed. story,” she says bitterly.

“I think that first day I went to work was the first day I ever saw a real kid with Down’s syndrome. I mean I really don’t have a memory,” Kathi adds.

“They had some real physically strange people in my first class, too,” Karen recalls. “One guy with his eye up in the middle of his forehead.”

“When I went out for the interview,” Kathi tells us, “the principal gave me some of the summary reports of the kids and their goals and stuff. For one kid, the goal was that he wouldn’t eat the media in art class! I thought, ‘What am I doing?’ I just couldn’t believe it!”

“Well, you had a lot of patience, though, didn’t you?” Karen inserts sarcastically.

“I must have had a lot of patience,” Kathi echoes with a nod. (This is the oldest special ed. joke. It seems that 90 percent of the time when you tell someone you are in special education they nod appreciatively and say, ‘‘you must have a lot of patience.” Of course one other time I told a neighbor what I did. He looked at me intently and said, “Oh, I’m sorry.”)

“What was the story on that one kid?” Karen asks Kathi. “The one that was absolutely humongous and when you came in to go down towards the office you had to walk by his classroom and he wore a helmet and he used to rise up and stare at the passers-by.” She elevates herself in the booth in an imitation of Dracula coming out of his coffin.

“That was Stan,” Kathi recalls. “Stan always reminded me of the guy in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest because I thought that he knew exactly what he was doing. He would stare at visitors. Then, there was that big thing at camp with Sally. She was really cute when she was younger and her big manipulation was to look up and say, ‘I love you.’’’ Kathi mimics a Shirley Temple voice. “She was most apt to say it if she’d done something really rotten.

“Sally was little and Stan was this huge, huge guy with a football helmet. Anyway, it was raining for a few weeks up there, so we had dances all the time. One night we looked over and there was Stan with his arm around Sally. She was looking up at him saying, ‘I love you.’ Then, one of the women teachers went over and broke it up and pulled Sally away because we didn’t know what in the heck he would do, you know. As the teacher was walking away, he slapped the teacher on the butt,” Kathi giggles. “After that, I never thought Stan was so out of it.”

“He’d lift up people’s dresses and smile,” remembers Karen. “Those are the things IQ tests don’t measure.”

“Oh, then there’s the Ranger Rick story, too. That’s one of the best special ed. stories.”

“Would you tell us that story, Kathi?” I beg artificially. This is a favorite special ed. pastime. It’s called telling “war stories.” To those in the club it’s perfectly natural (like pilots discussing crashes), but it does have the sound of laughing at people with disabilities. Actually it is laughing at people with disabilities. There is just no way to get around that. And the fact is that talking like this can sound really bad to people sitting in the next booth. The only excuse I have ever heard for telling war stories is that some of us are sanctioned to do so as a function of our chosen profession. We have become members of the family. And like many members of a family we sometimes say things about each other that we would not tolerate from “outsiders.” As one psychologist I know put it “We gave at the office.” But Kathi is feeling a bit guilty.

“I suppose,” she begins, “but don’t blame me if it comes out wrong. I remember at parties,” she goes on, “we used to sit around doing imitations and stuff. It’s a tension release that I really have to have. I mean, I just can’t imagine being in special ed. and being totally serious and not being able to laugh at some of the stuff that goes on. I don’t see how I’d ever get through it. You know, that’s a really neat quality. Don’t you think that most good special ed. teachers are like that? That they sit around and laugh about the stuff? Or maybe it’s just my friends.

“Well,” Kathi continues, “we’d been up there at this camp and we got this forest ranger named Ranger Rick to take us on a nature walk. That was the week that we had the low, low, low kids,” she says, dropping her voice with each ‘low.’ “Kids who could barely walk. Really out of it. Rick really didn’t know what he was dealing with at all. He just had no concept of what they understood and didn’t. So, he would point out this flower and tell us Latin names and that it propagates yearly and he would use all these scientific terms and the kids are like-”

“Having seizures, drooling,” Karen adds, getting into the story.

“So, anyway, he gave this real long spiel with all these Latin terms about this flower and then he handed it to this kid and the kid put it in his mouth and ate it.” We all laugh appreciatively.

“Then the ranger realized what he was dealing with. He was really shook up. I guess he did finish the walk, but he would sort of say, ‘There’s a tree, that’s the grass.’”

“That’s why I like the disturbed kids,” I say. “I always remember taking a bunch of kids to the library. They walk in and, you know, immediately start making noises and the librarian comes over and ‘shushes’ them.”

“And they were supposed to be horrified and upset.”

“Right, while one of them was busy eating his own thumb.”

“Tell the story about taking the kids to the-”

“Wax museum!” Karen shouts.

“We called ahead to the museum and told them we were bringing a ‘school group.’ The other teacher and I looked like punks ourselves and we had these awful boys. They were rotten to the core! They were so cute. We came in and there was this girl who was going to give us the ‘school group’ tour and she started out in the lobby with wax figures of great inventors. She said, ‘And here we have a display of inventors. Here’s Thomas Edison who invented the light bulb and over here we have Henry Ford. What mode of transportation did Henry Ford invent?’ There was dead silence. The kids were really trying to be a ‘school group’. They didn’t want to be total jerks their whole lives. But there was dead silence and the kids were looking at each other. Finally, one kid very bravely answered, ‘The horse?’” We all laugh again.

“She said, ‘Maybe if one of you teachers would start the kids through, I’ll catch up with you.’ Then she disappeared.”

Now Kathi is really getting into the storytelling. “That reminds me of the story of Janet. She was this girl who was thirteen going on forty-five, and she was the most profane person I’ve ever met in my life. One day we took the kids to this park. No one under seventy-five goes there except people from the school. The old guys are playing shuffleboard out there, and I guess there were some moms with little babies and stuff. A quiet, peaceful park. So Janet wanted to do something really obnoxious. She didn’t want to leave with us because she’d rather stay there and make a dope deal or something. I don’t know. So, one of the male teachers got into this confrontation with her and Janet started screaming at the top of her lungs, ‘He’s trying to rape me! Come help me!’’’

The people in the next booth stop talking.

“So, all of us ran over and were trying to help him control her and she was kicking him and hitting him and all this stuff. Then, all of a sudden, we looked up and there were these police cars there. Somebody took an arm, and somebody took a leg, and somebody took each foot and they were dragging her back to the car and she was saying, ‘They’re trying to kill me!’ It took a long time to explain that one to the cops.”

“I ran a kid down at the Skaggs drug store at Seventy-Fourth and McDowell,” I recall happily. “He was ditching school and I was driving around looking for him and saw him duck in there, so I chased him down the aisle and nearly tackled him. We slid down the aisle and up to the manager. All these people were looking down at us, so I said, ‘It’s okay. I’m his teacher.’ Famous special ed. line.”

“There was this other kid who did that, too,” recalls Kathi. “He was super-violent. Really, he would go into these rages and tear the whole place apart. So, they put him in restraints, but he managed to get bindings down far enough so that he could hop across the street. Across the street was this car wash and the policemen would always take their cars over there. So, he hopped across the street,” Kathi does a fair hopping imitation in the booth much to the amusement of a waitress, “and told the policemen that this man had tried to kidnap him. Then some of the teachers came out and ran across the street. And he says, ‘There they are! There they are! The kidnappers. Arrest them, arrest them!’ They almost did, too. None of us looked like teachers. We had to take the cops over to the hospital and give them all our ID and call the superintendent and all this stuff to prove who we really were.”

Karen pushes the rest of the french fries out of convenient reach. “In those days I think we all looked like we were two years older than the kids and like we were freakos. I don’t know why anyone would ever believe that we were the teachers. We didn’t have to act like regular people. In fact, I had a student teacher show up at the hospital one time dressed like she was working in a prep school. She was dead by noon.” She draws herself up and says with an authoritative air, “The principal tried to give me a hard time when I first went there about how I dressed and how I behaved, but all I would do is threaten to send the kids to his office. It wasn’t a real direct threat. I’d try to be a little bit subtle and say, ‘Oh, you don’t like the way I’m handling these kids or the way I teach? Well, maybe I better start sending the kids down to you to handle.’ He’d say, ‘Oh, no. You’re doing a fine job.’’’

“That’s another thing,” I say to Karen. “When we hit the public schools, we were much cockier than people who hadn’t been at private schools or on wards. I definitely felt like there was nothing in the public school that was of any consequence or challenge to me.”

“I felt that way,” Kathi adds, “until I went into LD. I didn’t have an inkling about how to teach reading. Not an inkling. I could handle the behavior. I was confident about that. But I didn’t have a clue about academics.”

“Right, “I agreed, “it didn’t occur to me until some time later to actually teach something. I thought all I had to do was have meaningful relationships with disturbed kids.”

“I never really taught academics, but when I was supervising those forty million student teachers and interns, I was never so bored in my life as when I was in public school resource rooms for kids with academic problems,” Karen says, reliving the experience. “There would be four kids in there doing their little thing, and I mean it was deathly quiet! No interaction. They were doing all academics and I just couldn’t stand it. I’d find an excuse to leave after ten minutes. Boring!”

“I love academics,” Kathi counters. “That’s my favorite because I really get into diagnosing and I can really see the progress. It’s like a mystery or something. I figured out how to get the kid to level. I saw the progress and it was exciting. (NOTE 4)

I recall observing Kathi in a classroom years earlier. I’d been impressed.

“See, you probably did it,” I say. “I mean, you actually taught. I hate that washtub or ice cream bucket mentality in some special ed. rooms. Each kid comes in and has her own little wash tub, file folder or bucket and the teacher puts the work in there by ripping out sheets from workbooks. The kid gets the bucket with her name on it and takes out the first sheet and goes to work. All the teacher does is walk around giving out points for finishing worksheets. A machine could do that. Besides those teachers are totally dependent upon the quality of the workbooks and I know they aren’t any good. That is NOT special education!” (NOTE 5)

“I know what you mean, but I didn’t teach that way.”

“I see what you mean about diagnosing, but I like to do that with social behavior. I never liked to do it with academics,” Karen tells us. “I never thought that was real interesting. Maybe I just never knew very much about how to teach academics. It might have been total ignorance on my part,” she admits. (NOTE 6)

“I wasn’t real interested until I did it,” I admit.I

“It is true that it is easier to specify performance levels for academics,” I observe. “It’s real hard to say how many friends a kid should have-”

‘‘Yeah,’’ Kathi interrupts, “and can he make friends at all times and in all places? If I teach a kid reading, he almost certainly can read at home or in the next classroom or anyplace else. I feel academics are more reinforcing. It’s more concrete and I see more growth. I think that’s why I like it more. I always felt social behavior was never-ending. Then I got caught up in that ‘Who’s to say that they should act this way?’ I really got caught up in the fear that I was making them into little ‘Kathis’ or something.”

We all nod in recognition of the ultimate teacher quandary. That is the confusion over what behaviors we have the “right” to change. Many teachers never come to grips with the fact that their business is changing behavior. Others who do accept that their goal is to alter what the student is doing still must develop a set of personal change guidelines. The special education teacher has to face these issues on a more dramatic scale. Some say their goal is to make students “normal” without making them all the same.

“I went through that the first year,” Karen recalls. “Should I make them raise their hand and should I make them stand in line and should I tell them what to do and what to think and how to feel? I resolved it by the ‘choices thing’: ‘You’re not an awful person if you choose not to do your math, but the consequence is that you can’t go to recess.’ I justified it to myself by telling them that they had that choice. They’d say, ‘I don’t have to do this.’ I’d say, ‘you’re absolutely right. You don’t have to, but...’ That ‘but’ is how I resolved my fears.”

“I just decided that I knew what was right,” I state.

“I probably really thought that, too.”

“I always thought that it was better that they listen to me than some other jerk,” I half-joke.

The dinner dishes give way to wine glasses and Karen focuses on hers. “Schools are supposed to prepare kids for life. But in a very real sense special ed. kids are ‘thrown out’ of school. So sometimes it seems like all we do in special ed. is try to get the kid back into school. To fix it so she or he won’t be referred again. I think sometimes we get so wrapped up in the problems of controlling kids in the school/institution that we forget life. Life is not always ‘waiting your turn,’ ‘staying in your seat,’ or ‘following directions quietly.’”

“I’ve noticed that educators usually say ‘follow directions’ when they mean ‘take orders.’’

“Did you ever have a kid start mimicking you, though? Not teasing you, but copying you and your behaviors?”

“Sure,” Karen says.

“Sometimes you’re the only real model they have because all the other kids are screwed up and they’ve never been near a normal kid.”

“And sometimes, if we don’t just tell kids how to act, they have to watch us,” I add. “Imagine how confusing it must be to a kid who knows she or he isn’t behaving correctly (because she or he has been put in special ed.), but no one ever tells the kid how to act. So they try to copy us, the teachers. But we’re not all the same. Imagine a kid trying to play Karen and Kathi both at once.”

Karen nods in agreement. “I don’t know if this happens anymore,” she says, “but when I got out of school, I always put kids on a point system. That’s just what I did. The first year, I had my whole class on a point system. They could trade for candy bars and plastic yo-yos or something. I had these two kids who were kind of withdrawn. The kids came up to me and asked if they had to be on that point system because they never misbehaved. I said, ‘Well, yes, you have to be on it. I mean, I think you have to.’ I didn’t know how to handle that. ‘What do you do when somebody doesn’t need to be on the point system?’ I thought, ‘If I don’t have the point system, what do I do?’ All I was ever taught was points.” (NOTE 6)

“It’s real interesting that in the university classes that cover academic methods they always teach you how to pick the different method for the different kid. With social behavior, the whole class has the same method. Points. That’s just nonsense.”

“It’s because we teach individuals to read and write-- but we ‘control’ social behavior,” Karen observes. “We don’t ‘teach’ social behavior. We control students so they won’t tear the school down. Lots of times they’d be better off if they did tear it down.”

“Radical.”

“They say that if I give points to one kid, I have to give them to all because they won’t understand. That’s a crock. The kids really understand. That’s Tommy’s problem and Tommy needs to have this. I’ve never had that problem.”

“That’s the most valuable lesson for them to learn . . .”

“That not everybody is treated the same.”

“Right.”

“Sometimes I’d be working on one kid’s problem and another kid would say, ‘Well, how come you’re doing that with him?’ I’d say, ‘If you have a problem about yourself that you’d like to change, come and tell me about it and I’d be very happy to help you work on it.’ And they’d go, ‘Ohhh, I don’t have any problem.’”

“That is a neat idea,” Kathi observes.

‘‘Yes, that is good,” I agree.

“With really low functioning kids I never have to worry about that because they never notice what’s going on.” Kathi adjusts the candle in the center of the table and peers out at the room as if reminding herself that she is in public. “I was just thinking when we tell these stories, it’s like we’re laughing at the kids.”

“When I had a real good aide,” Karen recalls, “it made all the difference in the world, because we would laugh our brains out all day long. The kids would do something and we’d look at each other and make faces and write notes and laugh. Half the time we were really laughing at ourselves. It had just an amazing influence on how I’d feel at the end of the day.”

“It’s a whole different thing than sitting around bitching about the kids. And, besides, funny things do happen--you’d be weird if you didn’t laugh.”

“Okay, give us another.”

“Well,” Kathi begins, “last year I was teaching ‘practical skills’ and the rest of the school took that literally and decided that I should deal with teenage girls in the life-skills class who were starting their periods. For some reason, that was a practical skill. The first kid who started was this gigantic girl named Alice who threw violent tantrums and became totally dead weight. She weighed 150 pounds. Just incredible! Unfortunately, she got really upset when she started her period and she didn’t want to put the old pad on.”

‘‘You could have given her a new one.”

“Funny.” She rolls her eyes. “This was the first week of school. I was not having any luck getting Alice to put the pad on. So, my main technique was to stop every woman walking by and say, ‘you have a period, don’t you?’ And they would say, ‘yes.’ I’d say, ‘you wear a pad, don’t you?’ And they would say, ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s great!’ But, Alice didn’t like that. That wasn’t her thing. So, I tried cajoling her and being real buddy-buddy. ‘Well, Alice, come on. Let’s talk about this. You like your clothes nice and neat. You don’t want to get all dirty, do you? She’d say, ‘yes, I do.’

“I tried everything. So, then, I went to Mary, the principal, and told her what was going on and she decided that what we should do is hold Alice down and put the pad on. Wrong move. I don’t know why I got involved with that because it was just a big power struggle. Alice started throwing this big tantrum while we all held her down and put the pad on her. The whole school was shaking and everybody knew about it. We got it on and she immediately ripped it off. There she was sitting in the bathroom with the pad in the trash can. It was just horrible. We never got it on her that day.

“We sent a note to her mother and said, ‘Alice started her period today and we didn’t have much luck putting the pad on her. Maybe you could work on this at home. Help us out a little here.’ So, we get this note back the next day and it said, ‘We examined Alice very carefully and don’t see any signs at all of what you’re talking about.’ It was really bad. Apparently, kids with Down’s have very sporadic menstruation. I didn’t realize this before, and it stopped after that first day. Gave us a little breather.

“The next time, of course, everyone brought her to me again: ‘Kathi, come and take care of this.’ By this time, I had established a little better rapport with her and so I tried the old buddy-buddy thing and she got it on and I immediately grabbed someone who was walking by and said, ‘Alice put the pad on. Isn’t that fantastic?’

“So, right away, they fell all over her we praise. We walked down the hall and I grabbed someone else and said, ‘Hey, Alice did it!’ The bus driver and everybody. Everybody who walked into the school that day had to tell Alice how great it was that she put the pad on. I sent a big note to her parents, ‘Alice put the pad on. Buy her a radio or a TV, something!’

“The next time it happened, she went to the cabinet all by herself, got the pad, and showed me. (She didn’t speak.) She knew what to do. Then, a couple days later, she did it again. I thought, ‘Maybe I should check this out.’ She was not having her period! I did a great job of teaching her how to put it on; I just forgot to teach her when. Very practical of me!

“That was one of my IEP goals for her. That Alice will wear her pad. . . . The secretary at the school just couldn’t handle me at all with my objectives. One objective was ‘Joe will urinate without playing with his penis.’ The secretary went to the principal about it. Mary told her she had to leave it in, but the secretary was real upset because she didn’t want to type it up. She thought it was inappropriate and she didn’t want to write that nasty stuff.

“One day,” she continues, “I left Alice’s IEP and a note for the substitute with the pad stapled onto it as a visual aid. I said, ‘Attached is the visual aid.’ Mary loved it. She said she put it in my file. They said that they actually got the pad out and put ketchup on it and all this stuff.

“It turned out really neat because we had this other girl, too. Everyone thought it was real funny to send them in my room. Real funny. So, with this other girl, it was the same thing. Her mother totally denied that she was having a period.

“So I said, ‘Remember Alice?’” Kathi mimics herself talking to a kid who is having trouble understanding. “ ‘Remember the first time she had her period?’ (Everybody remembered that.) ‘Well, Alice wears hers now all the time with no problem at all.’ She would not put it on until she went and got Alice. Alice was really neat. It was peer tutoring or something. Alice just loved it. She took her to the cabinet and showed her. She took her in the toilet stall and put it on herself to show her how to put it on. No problem at all. It was really neat.”

“Then I had the other one,” Karen reminds. “The kid who was masturbating a lot in class and then he sort of--”

“Developed his own version of peer-tutoring,” Kathi finishes. “He was helping the other boys masturbate. My goal was that he should do it in bed. Unfortunately, he started doing it in the bed in the classroom. So, then, I had to revise what I said to him. I told him he had to do it in bed, at home, alone.”

Karen laughs, “Bonnie was telling a story about day care and the kids taking naps. Where Casey goes to day care, they take naps. Bonnie was in there one day and the kids were all on their cots having naps and Bonnie asked, ‘How do you get the kids to all stay down and have their naps and not keep jumping up and poking each other?’ So, the teacher goes into this, ‘Well, it’s not easy. We have this elaborate positive reinforcement program. They can earn snacks by staying in bed, and stickers. If they’re lying there asleep, I put a sticker on their hand so that when they wake up, they see it.’ Bonnie was saying, ‘That’s really impressive.’ “So, a couple of days later Casey said, ‘Guess what Miss Smith said when Roy wouldn’t go to sleep at nap time?’ and Bonnie said, ‘What did the teacher do?’ Casey said, ‘Well, she told him she was going to call the doctor and have his legs cut off at the knees.’ “

The three of us laugh.

Changing the subject, I ask, “Do you have a lot of trouble with parents and sexuality? You said that one parent denied the kid was having her period. It seems like that would be real upsetting. I mean, that’s a big thing. No one talks about it but of parents severely disabled kids often have to decide whether to sterilize their kids.”

“Yeah, it is,” Kathi agrees. ‘‘We started to do sex education with the kids and then we decided that we should do parent groups first. We never got past the parent groups to the sex education. They’re all real concerned that people will take advantage of their kids sexually. We had this one little kid. He was ten, but he was very small, about like a five year old. He was always acting out in sexual ways. Teenage girls were his girlfriends and he was always noticing people’s boobs and all this kind of stuff. For his age it was a little advanced. His parents said that when he was playing the normal kids would tell him to do these things and then they would laugh at him. The parent’s concern was that people would lead him into sexual encounters that he really didn’t understand. They felt that he really didn’t have sexual feelings, but that he was being reinforced for the behaviors.”

“I can see where that could be true, but I can also see where that response could be the parent denying the kid’s sexual feelings.”

“Oh, I don’t think that was true with this kid and his parents. His parents were real aware. They were really neat.”

“When I first student-taught,” Karen says, “we had a problem with this teenage kid grabbing girls’ boobs on the playground and lifting skirts. So, I finally decided to ask the kid why he was grabbing girls’ boobs and he said, ‘Because I have hungry hands.’ That was worse than I’d thought. None of my courses dealt with ‘hungry hands.’”

The waitress comes to the table and offers to refill the glasses.

“It was interesting.” Kathi tells us. “We were going to talk about sex education, but what came up was sterilization. All the families, no matter how young the kid was, had thought about it. I could tell that the parents really hadn’t talked about it that much with each other because the couples were in conflict about what they should do about it. They didn’t agree within the parent couple. Usually, the men were against it. The women thought that there should be sterilization whether it was a male or female child. One man was Catholic and said that it would be religiously and morally wrong. Then, this other guy said that he thought his daughter shouldn’t be deprived of the opportunity to have children and that he could imagine her in a supervised setting caring for a child. One of the parents was looking into some kind of medication that suppressed hormones.”

“She wasn’t going to sterilize him; she was just going to reduce his sex drive?”

“No, it was supposed to be male birth control. It wasn’t a sex drive thing. It was a sperm depressor or something like that. It was real sad. Until this year, I never really could resolve what I thought about it.”

“So, did you resolve it?”

“Well, yeah, now I think that they should be sterilized,” Kathi sighs. “I think it’s a shame that they’re deprived of having kids, but I think there are opportunities for them to be around children and to help care for them in a supervised setting. I really don’t think that some very low functioning people are capable of making the abstract decisions and the crisis decisions that parents have to make. I don’t think it’s fair for a child to be raised in a . . . I think it’s going to create another person with a disability. You’re not giving their child a fair chance.”

“Somebody could say that about the children of a lot of people in this world.”

“You know what I mean”

“It’s a problem if you sterilize them when they’re ten years old because you think they’re permanently impaired and it turns out they’re not.”

“It certainly could be abused, that’s true.”

“ There is always going to be the problem of where you draw the line.”

“I would only want to make a decision for my own kids. . .”

“It would have to be case by case.”

“. . . if they were my kids I’d probably have them sterilized,” Karen summarizes. “Do parents have trouble with their kids being sexually active? Or is it just the idea of birth control?”

“They’re all worried about it,” Kathi replies to Karen. “Part of it is that some parents want to keep a ‘baby’ around all the time. You see that over-protection in a lot of the parents of severe kids. They want to keep the ‘baby’ at home. They get something out of their child being dependent upon them. They reinforce it like crazy. I think part of the motivation, like that mother who was denying the girl was having her period, is not wanting the kid to be growing up. Parents say, ‘I will always have to take care of Alice.’ And that probably isn’t true if they don’t want it to be true. But, then, some of them are just truly worried that other people will take advantage of and sexually abuse their kid.”

“There’s also the image of the retarded person as a sex maniac. Lots of people believe retardation includes perversion. In movies, the sex maniac often is cast with the features of retardation. Lenny in Mice and Men.”

“Parents might train their kids not to act sexually for fear that the behavior that is okay for ‘normal’ kids might get them in trouble.”

“Well, I was going to say that I never liked parents,” I state, too bluntly.

“That’s understanding of you,” Karen notes.

“There’s all this stuff now about the parents this, the parents that, the parents’ rights. . . and I never seem to get along with parents. I’m not sure they always want the right thing. One of the biggest misconceptions going around these days is that parents have absolute say over their kids’ education. The public law didn’t give parents any rights it gave kids rights. It gave disabled kids the right to an education.” (NOTE 7) I notice I’m lecturing. My voice takes on a classroom tone that seems out of place amid the remains of dinner. It’s hard for teachers not to teach.

“The school districts and state departments are so shy of lawsuits that they’ve only attended to the due process clause of the law. I’ve asked groups of special ed. teachers, ‘Do parents have veto power over an IEP?’ and everybody will say, ‘Yes, they do.’ They do not. The school has the same power over the IEP as the parent. But the school won’t use the power because it doesn’t function as an advocate for the kid.” I find myself getting really worked up.

“You know what we did this year with a couple of difficult parents?” Kathi takes over. “We changed the IEP goals, but we taught what we wanted to anyway in addition to what they wanted. So, we did work on their goals, but we also did whatever we wanted to, too. I just please the parents and do what I want. Why get into a big conflict about it? Just play a game with them. I have the power there.

“Actually, sometimes some good things come out of IEP meetings. One parent wanted me to teach her girl to unlock a door with a key and to lock it. I had never even thought of teaching that as a skill and it was a really pertinent thing that I should have been doing in practical skills. I did that with all the kids. It was a good thing. It was a neat idea. She wanted it, specifically, because the kid was having problems getting into her house. I think that’s true especially in special ed.”

“Why ‘especially in special ed.’?”

“Because,” Kathi elaborates, “the parents are often part of the problem itself. That’s one reason why I want to go into social work. I think that if I don’t work with the parents, I cannot help the kid because the parents can undo everything that I do. The parents create a lot of the kids’ problems, even severe impairments. Some parents make their kids into dependent things. They never talk to them about their feelings. They never talk to them at an adult level.”

“A lot of special ed. teachers are the same way,” Karen says.

I’m reminded of a story and say, “There was a girl named Connie who had been misdiagnosed as retarded and was previously put in a classroom of retarded kids. She talked as if she had a speech impediment. She had no physical reason to talk that way. So, we started shaping her up and telling her not to talk that way. She had been in a classroom with a lot of kids who had cerebral palsy. She talked like she had cerebral palsy and she did not have cerebral palsy. When we started changing that, the parents took her out of the program because ‘you’re changing our daughter’. They didn’t like that at all.

“Essentially, what we were saying in school was, ‘you can’t act that way here.’ She’d walk up like she had cerebral palsy and she’d hit the door and we’d say, ‘That’s it, Connie, no more CP.’ Then she’d walk in and be a normal kid. She’d walk out and see Mommy and have cerebral palsy again.”

“See, that’s why I’m going to work with families. I don’t think it’s of any use at all just to work with the kid in the classroom. So much of it is all emotional. I think I have very few truly neurologically impaired kids,” Kathi persists.

Karen has worked extensively in psychiatric settings. She observes, “Psychiatrists traditionally dealt with that by breaking up the family. Take the kid away. Send the kid off some place or tell him to run away from home. Psychiatrists won’t admit that.”

“I can’t tell you how many times we would find jobs those low functioning teenage kids could really do. People would hire them, the kid wanted to do it, we trained them to take buses and all this stuff, and the parents wouldn’t let them do it. If I can’t work with the family. . . I mean the family must be approached first; I work with them first, and get them to agree to it and counsel them along with the kid. Parental involvement has to be part of the deal, or the kid will never have a chance.”

“I guess there are two sides to that, though. If the parents won’t help, you still have to go on. Sometimes go against the parents,” I insist.

“Your problem is you only see the kid as your client,” Kathi tells me. “That’s what I like about family therapy. They don’t see anybody as an identified client. The family is the thing that is sick and that kid is serving a need for the rest of the family.”

“My friend, Matt, always says there are three types of parents: The first type hates everything you do. The second loves everything you do. The third doesn’t show up. And, of the three, the third is the easiest to work with.”

“God, Ken!”

“Hey, talk to Matt. Matt dislikes parents and cats (I believe he dislikes cats the most).”

“He’s not here or I would.”

“ But I can’t deprive the kid of help if the parents won’t come,” I respond defensively, “when I get to the bottom line it is all up to me.”

“You can have it that they won’t enroll the child unless the family comes.”

“You can’t do that in the public schools,” I remind her.

“There was one morning that we had six staffings scheduled in a row and only two people showed up.” Karen recalls, “I call them; I do everything. Sometimes they just don’t come.”

“That’s a whole other skill, working with those families. It’s like with disturbed kids. It’s something to be learned. I think it can be done,” admonishes Kathi. “Maybe they don’t come to your staffings because they know you don’t like them.”

“What you’re saying is true,” I conclude. “I went into education to work with the kid. It’s hard to realize that to do a good job of it I also have to work with adults. However,” I insist, “when the parents don’t show, I still have to do something with the kid. The best thing to do with the kid would be to intervene in all situations with all relevant people, personalities, and environments. But lots of times we don’t do the best thing.”

“Why not?”

“Because we don’t have the resources.”

“Or the interest,” Kathi responds harshly. “We’re always studying kids in isolation, or in classrooms and with teachers, when the system that has the most impact on them is their family. They spend the most time with them. That’s where most of their behavioral learning comes from. It’s the most significant system for them, especially when you’re working with really wacked-out kids. In one program where I used to work, the teachers were really saying that the parents were the bad guys. I think that’s destructive because the kid has to go home to that family system. The teachers would never tell the kids what to do with the family. Just that the parents were the bad guys. So, where does that leave the kid? More screwed up than ever! I think that’s a real prevalent attitude in special ed. That parents are the bad guys and pains in the neck. I think that’s real prevalent and real bad.”

“Yeah,” I compromise, “I heard a guy talk about assertiveness training one time. You can’t improve a relationship by working with only one member of it. You do your little social behavior thing or communication thing in school with the kid and it sounds great. Then the kid goes home and his dad’s reading the newspaper and the kid says, ‘Dad, I want to know about the Renaissance.’ Dad says, ‘Why don’t you go out and play?’ The kid says, ‘Do I hear you saying that you don’t have time to talk with me?’ The dad then pulverizes the kid.” (NOTE 8)

“That would be because you altered one member of the system, not the system.” Karen re-enters in the debate. “Another consideration is that the family is a fairly small system and if you have a person in it who is very disabled, that’s extremely disruptive to the family. So, the family may have been a very normal family until they had this kid and then that upset the system and screwed everybody up and then they started these deviant interactions. Then we come along later and say, ‘Look how awful this family is. They must have made the kid goofed up.’ When, in fact, the family was very normal. The kid goofed them up. This ‘innocence of childhood’ business is bullshit.”

“I guess I think this has something to do with severity,” I reflect. “I don’t see working with parents as a problem if we’re talking about severe kids. But your basic, mild, acting-out kid is a different problem altogether. When kids are ‘bad’ it’s because they aren’t acting like someone expects them to act. I’m never sure if we should change the kids or our expectations. What I mean--”

“Is that what the school expects, what you expect, and what the parents expect are different,” Karen finishes my thought.

“Right.”

“That’s why working with severe kids can actually be easier in some ways. The direction of treatment is clear cut. If a kid can’t eat, everyone will agree that we should teach him to eat. But if a kid does drugs or fights not everyone will agree that he shouldn’t.”

“I worked to stop a kid’s fighting all year and then found out his father was telling him he should fight.”

“In Learning Disabilities our training was all this neurological stuff. It was as if people were trying to explain a mild problem in the most severe terms. It was useless,” Kathi observes. “When I got in there, I saw that if the kid started working and gained some self-confidence, the kid’s learning would increase a hundred million times. And I really started seeing so many emotional components in LD. Most of the time, kids had just been failed so much they had a lot of pressure from home. That’s when I really got into the family stuff. The family is important.”

“And so is learning.” I add, “ The best favor a teacher can do is teach the kid. The best therapy is good teaching.”

“I think a lot of special ed. teachers (none of us, of course) have this thing where they get attached to their kids,” Karen says. “In a way, they want the kids to like them better than they like the parents. They get a kick out of saying, ‘Look how awful those parents are and now look at me. I’ve shaped these kids up. I’m really terrific.’ If you feel that way, there’s no gratification in shaping the parents up.”

“That’s the thing we were talking about before. That’s the same with the parents or the regular classroom teacher. It’s ‘us’ against the world. Our prestige is that we can deal with kids that the general education teacher can’t deal with. If the regular classroom teacher deals with him, then what’s so special about us? What’s so special about special ed.? Why are you in special ed.? What’s so special about you?”

“We cured the kid,” Kathi proclaims.

‘‘Yeah, but we don’t really see that.”

“Oh, I do.” she insists. “The kid comes to you and you are supposed to bring him up six grade levels in two semesters. There was a lot of pressure there. That was my reward. That was what I was being scrutinized for--to cure the kid. I wanted that regular teacher to think I did a good job. I wanted that kid to succeed because I would have failed if he didn’t. In special ed. you’ve got the whole school looking at you.”

“In EBD”, Karen says “they never want to see you or the kid again.”

“No,” Kathi admits, “they don’t. You’re off in a little corner there. If I can handle that kid and keep him from killing other kids on the playground, everyone’s satisfied with what you’re doing.”

It is getting late and we seem to have gotten into some hard core cynicism. I decide to push it a bit and ask, “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you in special ed.?”

“Worst in what way?”

“Any way you choose.”

Kathi considers the question briefly and begins, “The thing that popped into my mind was a conflict I once had when I quit a job working in an institution. It was hard for me to leave the job anyway. Especially one kid named Tony. I’d gotten really close to Tony and had taken him home on the weekends. I really loved him. I just loved him. I even thought about adopting him. When I left the job, my boss barred me from seeing Tony. He would not allow me visitation privileges. I would cry every time I drove by the school. It was really hard on me.” A melancholy look fills Kathi’s eyes and she seems to focus on it momentarily before giving a slight facial shrug and assigning the memory to some safer place.

“It’s interesting what I’ve done since then,” she continues. “Tony’s parents called me after my old boss was gone. I could have maintained contact with Tony through the years because that obstacle is gone, but I couldn’t handle it. I never went to see him again. I feel really guilty about it. I think about it; but, emotionally, it just tore me up too much to lose him.”

“Have you gotten that close to other kids since then?”

“No, never. I have kept a certain distance. I would never take a kid home ever again because of that. I just got too involved with him.”

“What was the worst thing that ever happened to you, Karen?”

“I think it was when I was working on the psychiatric ward and got called up at two in the morning to come down because everyone was killing themselves on the unit,” Karen’s voice noticeably drops. It’s not the sad tone that Kathi had used moments before. Karen’s voice seems troubled and a little afraid. She describes walking into the darkened ward with its hollow rooms and safety-glass windows webbed with wire. “It was real spooky. There were kids all over and blood smeared on the windows. Somebody had started cutting herself up.”

Kathi gives a concerned sigh and leans forward for support as Karen continues. “The bad thing was that I had to help put a kid in restraints. My job was to lay across her legs so they could tie her down. My own big personal fear is being restrained. It was horrible. Just horrible! I wasn’t sure that was the right thing to do with this kid. She was cutting herself up real bad and was bleeding all over and was totally berserk. Still, when we started to hold her down and restrain her, she just started crying and kept saying, ‘Please don’t tie me up. I can’t stand it.’ It was exactly what I would have been saying. Luckily, some of the counselors were aware that it was real upsetting and were supportive.”

Karen has the look of a smoker in serious need of cigarettes. “I’ve been involved in a lot of things with severely disturbed kids that I thought were morally wrong. And therapeutically wrong. Some of the doctors would keep a kid in isolation for a real long time. It was a moral dilemma deciding if I should stand up to them and just unlock the door. One time at a staffing, one doctor was insisting that we lock up another kid, and the directors asked me what I thought, and I said, ‘I wouldn’t do it and I wouldn’t work in a place that would do it.’ They said, ‘Well, what would you do instead?’ and I mentioned about six things that we could try instead. He said, ‘Okay.’’’

“I’ve seen the worst things in prison schools” I said, “Our society allows some awful things”.

“I imagine.”

“But I think the worst thing that I was ever involved in happened when I was working with EBD teenagers. One day, a kid about fourteen was really focused in on another kid and was backing him into a corner. I could see that a fight was about to break out so I walked over and reached out from behind and touched the fourteen year old on the arm. All I did was reach out from behind and touch his arm. But it startled him or something, and he snapped rigid and fell over in a full seizure. He was completely involved before he even hit the ground. I guess in his universe my hand must have just come from another dimension, and he couldn’t process it, so he shut down.”

“It scared you?”

“Yes, but what really got me was that I could have that much impact on someone just by reaching out and touching them. Its always bothered me.” I think about it for a second then change the subject on myself, “I’ve always had a hang-up about medications too. And in hospitals and prisons, that’s a big thing.”

“Once, I was writing a behavior evaluation tool for use by the hospital staff,” Karen tells us. “It was supposed to list examples of inappropriate, or deviant, behavior. We sent it around to the staff as if we wanted some input (we didn’t really, but I always think you’re supposed to ask for other people’s input). The nurses insisted on adding an indicator that the kid won’t argue about taking his meds, that the kid be compliant about taking medication. They meant not even asking, ‘What is this medication?’ ‘What am I taking?’ Anyone should ask about medication--but the nurses thought if a kid questioned the pills he was deviant.”

‘‘You brought up meds. Were you going to say something?”

“Probably.” I think for a moment. “Oh, yeah--in one district where I play psychologist we had a kid who was placed out of the district in a self contained classroom. The receiving school district called up about a month after they got him and said that the kid was misdiagnosed and was actually severely retarded and shouldn’t be in a resource class. They said, ‘He’s inappropriate for this classroom. He’s retarded and unresponsive.’ And we said, ‘You’re wrong. He’s not.’ And they said, ‘Well, he can’t learn anything. He can’t do anything.’ Their psychologist was arguing with me over the phone until finally he said, ‘Come down and look at him if you want,’ and hung up.

“Well, I flew down there and walked into the class and, my God, the kid looked like he’d been hit by a truck. He was almost in a coma. I said, ‘What’s going on with him?’ and they said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘This is like he’s dead. What did you do to him?’ and they said, ‘We didn’t do anything to him.’

“It turned out that just before he moved, his parents took him in because they thought he was ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder], some doctor had put him on something, and he’d gone to sleep. He was totally zoned. He’d slept for a month so they decided he was mentally retarded. They were kind of dumb to think he was retarded because he was asleep, but, on the other hand, nobody informed them that this kid had been put on medication. They had never seen him the way I had seen him, and I had never seen him the way they were seeing him then. It was like two totally different kids. The physician never called the schools and never asked for any data on the impact of the meds.”

“Why didn’t the parents say anything?”

“They were hoping to keep a low profile and let the kid get a fresh start.”

“When I was in California,” Kathi recalls, “occasionally, certain doctors would send forms that asked me how a kid was behaving so they could re-evaluate the medication.”

“Good for them!”

“It was encouraging. Did they ever ask you at the hospital? It would be so easy to check with you.”

“We charted every day and had staffings often,” Karen relates. (NOTE 9) “One of the big reasons why the kids were on the unit was to adjust their medication. It was just automatic. There was never any doubt that we would medicate the kid if he came to the hospital. Lots of kids are placed in there just to stabilize their medication because no one can get them to take pills at home. And you can’t watch closely enough. With a lot of medications you keep increasing the dosage until it gets so high that they’re asleep, or they freak out, or they have side effects. Then they just drop it down a little. That’s the way they figure out the dosage.”