School Daze

I was three years old, in pre-school at Leonard Flynn Elementary in San Francisco. My family and I were on an airplane coming back from New York. I had my language tray at my seat and my mother had a slate. She wrote the word “Mom” on it and asked me, “Do you see this person on your tray?” I pointed to her picture. She was thrilled and I was too. Then she did the same thing with other names and I pointed to the pictures. When I got back to school, my mother told my teacher that I was starting to read.  The teacher said, “Well, we will show her the letters, but we won’t expect her to know them.”  She obviously thought I was dumb. My mom marched down to the school principal’s office and insisted on making the teacher teach me.  Duh! So she worked with me every day and my parents read to me every night until I was fully literate.

By the time I was in kindergarten at Le Conte Elementary in Berkeley, I could read very well and I was the smartest kid in my class. My instructional assistant was Andrea Blum.

My teacher, Louise Rosenkrantz, said I helped her to teach me.  She wore jeans and glasses all the time.  She saw my intelligence.  I realized that even though I couldn’t verbalize what I was learning, I was faster at learning than pretty much everyone around me. She inspired me.

By the second grade, I was still the best speller in the class but I fell behind in reading because the print started to get smaller and I couldn’t turn pages by myself.

At Malcolm X Intermediate School in Berkeley, I had a wonderful instructional assistant, Jennifer.

My parents and I made the school district build a ramp to the second floor of the school; otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to get to class.

I became a better writer because of my fourth grade teacher, Dana Hill. I always struggled at math because I couldn’t use my hands to manipulate stuff, which is probably why I hated math and I still do.

But when I got to Willard Junior High in Berkeley, the work got extremely difficult and I fell behind.  My parents took me to the doctor and I was tested for learning disabilities. I had to be put in special ed classes. I don’t remember learning anything in those classes and I didn’t have any friends.  I was in a support group that the “full inclusion specialist” set up for me to make friends. We did stuff in the community like go to movies and they came to my house.  I don’t think my social skills improved at all from being in that group.

At Berkeley High School I was put in fully inclusive classes, but I had to do my classwork in a broom closet, because the library was not wheelchair accessible.  I had an awesome teacher, Page Jackson, who advocated for me so I could advocate for myself. I don’t think I would have graduated if it hadn’t been for Page.

I couldn’t take a foreign language but I had to learn a symbolic language, Minspeak©, to access my communication device. I was able to graduate because we convinced the school to give me language credit for Minspeak©.

The first college I went to was Chabot College in Hayward.  The campus was beautiful. It had pretty trees and plants and the library was even accessible. I took one English class, which I passed. I also took a P.E. class for students with disabilities. It was cool because I got to lift weights for the first time. I got pretty buffed and I also passed that class. Why would I fail?

The next semester I got really scared commuting to school from Berkeley. My new attendant got stoned before she drove me there and she sped and wove around different traffic lanes. After I fired her, Megan J. went with me and I was taking public transportation, which made me late to class every day. I dropped out because I missed too much of the class and couldn’t pass it.

After that, the agency that was providing my attendants thought that a day program would be a good fit for me because the Regional Center would pay for the program and the agency would not have to pay my attendants while I was there. So I went to the CP Center.  I thought it was cool at first, because everybody had the same disability. That wasn’t enough to make a good experience. Cerebral palsy is such a broad label for people with different cognitive levels and physical abilities that there were some people who seemed to be asleep in their wheelchairs all day and others who were as intelligent as me, and some who could walk and talk. The classes were geared toward people with developmental disabilities and I felt lost. I started acting out by texting and listening to music on my device without headphones in class. That was my way of telling them I was unhappy there. Elvis, my ex, was there, and listening to music was also a way of drowning out his voice in my head.

I was finally able to talk to my therapist, my parents, the agency, and the counselor at the CP Center and tell them that I was unhappy there and I wanted to quit. So I made the smart decision to go back to college.

I’m now at the College of Alameda, taking Communication. It is close to my house, has a pretty campus, and I’m getting better support from the Disabled Students Services and my attendant. I’m much happier there because everybody has the same goal as me: a college degree. The class is interesting and the teacher actually teaches.

My dream is to graduate someday but right now I take it one day at a time.