Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XIV)

“The measure of the worth of a society is how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable citizens.”
-- Ted Sizer

The child with a disability does not fit the standard mold. Parents and educators learn to accept the child’s differences, meet him on his terms, and see the poetry in his struggle with words.

Under Public Law 94-142 public schools were mandated to accept children with disabilities. Athelantis was attending the third grade at the local public school after years of home schooling. Barbara and I became part of the first vanguard of parents with special needs children attending U.S. public schools as a result of the legislation. Our experience as parents in the system convinced us that the Waterways Project would bring the voices of the special needs students attending class in hospitals, residential settings, community groups, rehabs, and alternative to detention centers into the mainstream.

At first Athelantis stayed in a typical classroom with supplementary resource room services. After graduating elementary school, he would undergo major surgery, a maxillary advancement to reshape his head giving him larger eye sockets (so his eyes didn’t pop out) and improved tooth function. That surgery and the rehabilitation that followed would interfere with his schooling. An appropriate placement would ease his passage through those difficult years.

We found Athelantis a placement at the Horizon School in Queens; where he began calling himself Thomas, a name he still uses although his driver license annual tax statement say Athelantis. He had the maxillary advancement operation when he was thirteen and went to Horizon for another year before transitioning back into the public school system. Always a ham despite his differences, he auditioned for and was accepted at the Harbor School of the Performing Arts in East Harlem.

He graduated from Harbor to Satellite Academy, and became the first special education student officially given a seat in a NYC Alternative High School. The director at the Forsythe Street program of Satellite Academy was a nurturing, caring, and charismatic educator, and one of the first casualties of AIDS in the city. His funeral was packed with grieving kids, parents, and colleagues.

I had been assigned to work at a diagnostic reception site in East New York. The teenagers girls were often abused and abusive. Fights broke out in school. Barbara and I wrote about the site and published writing by the students in a newsletter aimed at parents working with the city's special education committees. As a result, I was removed from working at the site. That was the school system’s answer to the need for involvement and reform. But, a more engaged school administrator invited the Waterways Project into classrooms for students attending school at the Hospital for Special Surgery, Payne Whitney, Sloan Kettering Memorial, NYS Psychiatric Institute, Harlem Teams, LUCHA, Pyramid House, and the Karen Marsh Alternative to Detention Center. By 1982 I was teaching a class in an Intermediate School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The students had been labeled "EH" and gifted. Each week Barbara and I published their creative writing in a small magazine called "The Weekly Peeper."

Barbara was typesetting, printing, and binding the publications that came from all the sites where I taught. She also taught weekly writing workshops for children at the Jefferson Market Library. A series of poetry chapbooks entitled “In Search of a Song” came out of those workshops. By 2003 Ten Penny Players had published over a thousand small books in the series.