Every inch of progress Blaze had made in fourth grade was lost by the end of the first month of fifth grade. It was astonishing how rapidly everything fell apart. I had been so sure that placing Blaze in a regular fifth-grade classroom was the right thing to do, but it turned out to be one of the worst decisions I’d ever made where my son was concerned.
Blaze’s success in fourth grade had convinced me that he’d be all right in a regular class and this was reinforced by how well he’d done in summer school. Mr. Davidson was the teacher for that summer-school class, along with the aide that Dr. Roberts had hired, and Blaze had accomplished quite a bit. As I reacquainted myself with “Ring Around the Rosie” and the joys of pudding snacks with my preschoolers, Blaze produced a folder’s worth of written work and learned some basic math facts in his classroom two doors down.
Some time in July, Mr. Davidson took me aside and reiterated what Dr. Roberts had told me a few months earlier.
“I think Blaze would do really well in my class in the fall,” Mr. Davidson told me. “Kids like him make my class successful.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I really think it’s important for him to be around the kids he’s come up with through the grades.”
Mr. Davidson gave me a look that said he didn’t think this was nearly as important as I did, but what he said was, “I’m not trying to sell you on anything, you understand. Just something to think about.”
“I will,” I said and I did, but only briefly. Dr. Roberts had promised that Blaze would have an aide in the fall and I would be working at the school, able to keep an eye on Blaze, but still allow him the independence he needed. This was my plan and I thought it was a good one.
Unfortunately, there were a couple of key people missing from this plan. One was Grace or even a teacher like Grace. The other was Dr. Roberts.
Blaze’s fifth-grade teacher was pleasant, but she was definitely not in line to be my buddy. Like most of her colleagues, she suffered from the big-class syndrome and was clearly under pressure to produce kids with high test scores and winning essays in strictly defined categories. Blaze didn’t come close to fitting her model student. This pressure wasn’t necessarily coming from her, but from the other parents.
Since having Blaze in the “mainstream” environment of fourth grade, I’d come to know some of these parents, although not in a social sense. I got to know the moms and dads as we stood outside class waiting for our kids to be released for the day. I heard their complaints about the homework (too much, too little, not academically challenging enough), the classes (What do they need to take art for? They should have more sports here), and the teachers (too distant, played favorites, didn’t challenge the kids, didn’t produce high grades, and so on). But one of the biggest complaints I heard was that the “lower” kids were mixed in with the “higher” kids and therefore dragged everyone down. Lower was a euphemism for special (which in itself was a euphemism) and higher was a politically correct way of saying my kid.
Special-education law springs from the Individual with Disabilities Education Act, enacted in the 1970s with endless addenda ever since. The law states (and any parent with a child receiving any special services whatsoever will have seen this at least once) that every child has the right to a “free and appropriate” public education in “the least restrictive environment possible.” Least restrictive is interpreted in many different ways, but most commonly means that the child should be “included” in regular classes as much as possible with as few adults shadowing him as possible. Just like everybody else, in other words. The theory behind this is actually a very good one. It assumes that a special-needs child will learn practical social and academic skills from her “normal” peers while the normal kids will learn compassion, tolerance, outside-the-box thinking, and other qualities not normally fostered in a regular classroom. In some early-education programs (the one I worked in was one example), there was even “reverse mainstreaming,” where kids from the regular-ed classes would spend time in special ed for those very reasons.
The concept of mainstreaming was anathema to most of the regular-ed parents I met. Not wanting to seem terribly politically incorrect, most of them wouldn’t come right out and say, “I don’t want those kids in class with mine,” but the implication was there.
“It’s ridiculous to hold the whole class up because one child is reading on a third-grade level…”
“They’ve got those special-ed kids in there now and you know what that means….”
“I’m not saying they shouldn’t be in school, you understand, but shouldn’t they be in their own class?”
Without knowing that I was a parent of a special-ed kid, parents bitched and moaned to me all the time. If I felt compelled to tell them that my son was in special ed, I often got looks of dismay, embarrassment, even irritation, as if I shouldn’t have been listening and by doing so, I had violated some sort of code.
All this is to say that in fourth grade and in the beginning of fifth, while Blaze was “passing” as a regular-ed kid and I as his “normal” parent, I finally understood the kind of pressure most of these teachers faced. No doubt it would have been different if I’d been living in an area with a lower average income and a different demographic. In that case, poverty and disadvantage would have created their own pressures. This was why my area was one that was regarded as highly desirable by most teachers, even though most of them couldn’t afford to live where they worked and had long commutes. Ultimately, I think, many of these teachers were caught between administrative directives and parental pressures, leaving them very little time or inclination for special-needs kids.
Blaze’s fifth-grade teacher certainly fit this profile. She seemed a nice enough woman and I believe that she tried to integrate Blaze into her class as much as possible, but she simply didn’t have the tools or the time. This translated into an odd sense of helplessness that hovered in the air between us every time I spoke to her. Nor was there any of the camaraderie I’d had with Grace or even Mr. B.
Because Blaze’s teacher couldn’t provide the academic support he needed in her class, he spent almost the entire morning with Mary, the resource specialist. Mary’s job was to provide one-on-one tutoring and extra study time for the aforementioned “lower” kids who were struggling with a regular academic load. Most kids came to see her for twenty- or thirty-minute blocks of time but Blaze spent hours there at a stretch.
Mary and Blaze had gotten along well enough the year before when I’d gone with him on his visits to her small office, but without me there (and because they spent much more time in a small space together than they should have), deep fissures began to appear in their relationship. Mary prided herself on her take-no-prisoners style of instruction (“You think I like reading?” she’d tell a recalcitrant sixth-grader. “Well, I don’t, but it doesn’t matter, I have to read, and so do you. So just do it already.”), which was amusing for about five minutes, but then became very depressing.
I held open the possibility that Mary might once have been a talented educator, but by the time Blaze got to her, she seemed burned out and resentful. Blaze was intimidated by her and complained about her almost constantly. She was mean, he said, and she yelled at him. Don’t exaggerate, I told him, just do your work for her. She made him write the same sentence over and over, he said, until it looked right. He resisted looking up a word in the dictionary so she made him sit for an hour until he produced the definition of navigation. She sent him outside, made him sit on the bench, wouldn’t let him go to recess. And it wasn’t just him, Blaze said, she was mean to everybody, especially Matt, who often worked alongside him in her office. Matt was frequently in tears, Blaze reported.
Don’t make trouble, I said.
Sometimes Blaze would stop by my classroom on his way to Mary’s office and gaze longingly at the preschoolers. He wanted so badly to just chuck it all and go back to the joys of circle time.
“Can’t I stay here with you, Mom?” he’d ask
.
“Blaze, you’ve got to go to Mary. Go on, now.”
“I can’t go there, Mom. She’s evil.”
“She is not! Don’t say that.”
“She is. She’s an evil beast,” he said, but off he would go, looking miserable and defiant at the same time.
Mary demanded that Blaze spend part of the morning writing in his journal. When I read his entries, I was disturbed by how sad they seemed.
9/14/98
Devin sometimes plays with me at recess. Sometimes we play ball with a soft ball. At class time I think about her.
9/17/98
I wish I could fly, but I can’t. I can only fly on an airplane and go to San Francisco. I don’t think it’s fair that I can’t fly. But I don’t have wings.
9/18/98
When I was three years old, I had pajamas that looked like they had a hood and they had a zipper. They went all around my body. I had two pairs. One was light blue. Another was dark green. The zipper on my light blue pair broke and my aunt said, “What a bummer.” I remember this story but my mom does not.
9/19/98
I am such an idiot. Just a cow. I belong at America’s Dairy Farm.
9/21/98
One time I was at the beach. There was a high tide. It came in like crazy and splashed the road.
9/23/98
When Matt was upset, it felt like there was loud music in my head. When he cried, it felt like drums went off. I wonder if Mary felt that too. When we work quietly, it feels like Für Elise by Beethoven.
Blaze’s afternoons weren’t much better than his mornings. The aide Dr. Roberts had promised worked with Blaze for less than three hours at the end of the day and there wasn’t much love lost between him and Blaze from the start. Blaze mostly acted out in the afternoons, tossing books around, stomping out of class, and refusing to do work of any kind. His new aide, a young man with a distracted air about him, had no clue how to reach Blaze and didn’t make much of an attempt, besides. Slowly but steadily, Blaze began to spin out of control at school and I didn’t know what to do to help him.
And of course, Dr. Roberts was now gone as well. The scope and complexity of Dr. Roberts’s job finally became clear to me when I found that she’d been replaced by two people: a special-education administrator and a school psychologist. Dr. Roberts had been pulling double duty all those years and it became apparent to me why she’d finally called it quits.
Helen, the administrator, was all business and began her tenure by brandishing the motto, “Things are going to change around here.” I found myself in the awkward position of being this woman’s employee and a parent of one of her special-ed students. It was difficult to talk to her about Blaze. I didn’t feel that she understood him or his school history. Helen was also a big believer in zoning and thought every attempt should be made to keep Blaze at his home school. This was a complete reversal of Dr. Roberts’s feeling that Blaze should move to Mr. Davidson’s class. But after only a few weeks of fifth grade, I knew that Blaze wasn’t going to be able to stay where he was. By the end of September, he was spending his afternoons circling the classrooms with his shoes off, muttering, “I hate the evil beast. The evil beast must be destroyed.”
Clearly, things were not working out.
I scheduled an IEP meeting with Helen, Mary (a.k.a. “the Evil Beast”), and Mr. Davidson to arrange for Blaze to spend the first half of his day in Mr. Davidson’s class. While brief, this meeting was easily the most entertaining I’d yet attended, because it consisted mostly of Mary and Helen sniping at each other. Such a lack of decorum would never have occurred on Dr. Roberts’s watch.
Mary complained that she didn’t have the resources for a kid like Blaze. Helen warned her that resources weren’t the issue here. Mary then said that Blaze’s aide was “useless.”
“Personnel issues will be dealt with outside of this room,” Helen snapped. “This is neither the time nor place.” I kept my eyes fixed somewhere between Helen and Mr. Davidson, afraid that if I looked at my father, who was in his usual position next to me, I would start laughing uncontrollably.
But Mary was only just beginning. She yanked out some of Blaze’s “work samples,” consisting mostly of angry-looking scrawls, and thrust them across the table. “There,” she said. “That’s all he’s capable of.”
Mr. Davidson, who had also quite obviously been enjoying the interplay between the two women, suddenly stopped smiling and picked up the papers with an expression of extreme distaste.
“This isn’t right,” he said in his rumbling baritone. “I worked with Blaze in summer school and I’ve seen him do much better than this. Much better. I don’t even know what this is.” He then gave Mary what I could only describe as a ferocious stare. There was an intense silence in the room for a few seconds and then Helen picked up her pen and said, “All right, let’s wrap this up, shall we? I don’t think anybody disagrees that Blaze should move to Mr. Davidson’s class for the mornings.”
There were immediate and simultaneous murmurs of assent from everybody in the room.
The director feels very strongly about Blaze remaining for the afternoons to maintain contact with the peers at [his home school], Helen wrote in her notes. I signed the form and passed it to my father. Dr. Roberts would never have referred to herself on an IEP form, I thought to myself and, for some unknown reason, this made me smile.
When we left the meeting, Mr. Davidson walked out with me and my father.
“I know we agreed to mornings,” he said, “but I’d really like to have the kid for the whole day.”
“You sure about that?” my father said.
“Yes,” I said, in an attempt at levity, “you should be careful what you wish for; you might get it.”
“I’m serious,” Mr. Davidson said. “He’s a good kid. I know he’s capable of much more than he’s doing. That work she showed us in there was ridiculous. You know that, right?”
“I do,” I said. “It hasn’t exactly been going well with Mary.”
“I can tell,” Mr. Davidson said.
“Let’s see how it goes,” I said, finally.
“Okay. You folks have a good evening,” Mr. Davidson said and took his leave.
“What do you think?” I asked my father.
“I like him,” my father said. “He’s different, isn’t he?”
“Bit of an iconoclast, I think,” I said.
“That’s good,” my father said. “That’s good for Blaze.”
Before I had a chance to even think about transferring Blaze, however, there was another bit of torture to endure: Blaze’s three-year review. The triennial review was basically a mega-IEP meeting that produced a blizzard of paperwork. Psychological tests were performed and evaluated, current levels of academic performance were assessed based on various educational tests and class work, and levels of social development were discussed. I had been through one of these marathons in second grade when Blaze was starting to have big trouble in Kimmi’s class. I couldn’t remember the specifics of that meeting. It had become a long blur of bad news in my memory.
I was determined to be better prepared for this meeting. The new school psychologist had an office next to the preschool classroom where I worked. At lunchtime and during any break I got during the day, I went over to talk to her and discuss Blaze. I knew that she was planning to give him a battery of tests, so I explained Blaze’s history with tests, how, in my opinion, they’d never produced valid results and how anxious I was to make sure that we had an accurate reading. I was more forthright and objective with her about Blaze’s school problems than I had been with anyone who was not an immediate family member. I told her about my concerns, my fears and my hopes for Blaze. I was so honest, I almost sickened myself with my own sincerity. I offered to help her administer the tests. Blaze, I told her, was highly resistant to any kind of testing situation.
The psych listened to me, said she appreciated my help, discussed various developmental disorders with me, and
even gave me some research literature to read. We started having some spirited discussions about psychotropic medications for children. The psych was a big proponent of medication whenever possible, which didn’t surprise me, but our disagreement on this issue was a friendly one. Our whole relationship was a friendly one, in fact. I was glad that I was now working within the system, learning the procedures and acronyms of special ed. I felt that this afforded me a distinct advantage.
Predictably, Blaze proved difficult to test. He was cooperative but distracted. He gave the psych the answers he thought she wanted, rather than trying to solve any problems himself. He refused to do anything that he perceived as difficult. I was disappointed, as usual, that Blaze refused to show his real abilities, but not particularly worried. I had an understanding with the psych and I felt she’d be able to tease out the real Blaze in her assessment.
The meeting to go over her evaluations started in the early afternoon and would last for over three hours. The school psychologist, with whom I had established such rapport, led the discussion by passing out copies of her nine-page report and explaining its contents. Every test she had administered, the psych explained, had shown Blaze to be performing in the mentally retarded range. Although Blaze’s distractibility was a factor, she said, she felt that these results were fairly accurate. She didn’t feel that Blaze met the criteria for autism, although she wrote in her report that Ms. Ginsberg tended to see Blaze’s behavior as more appropriate at home than has been observed at school. Blaze’s anxiety level at school was very high, the psych said, and had significant impact on his social and academic performance. Therefore, she felt that Blaze could also be considered severely emotionally disturbed.
Raising Blaze Page 20