Intent and
Ignorance
Last year our
child spent months screaming and frightened into the late
hours of many nights, shaking, crying, "help me, help me, take
the bad images away." Why? Because a Boston Public School
illegally, and without our knowledge used physical restraint
on a very beautiful and sensitive six-year-old girl. Why?
Because to them this is a universal solution, a carefully
covered up solution, a cheep and dirty solution, to providing
what she really needed -- people working with her educated how
to work with her sensory overload disabilities, people with
instincts to care.
This was not done by an isolated deranged social misfit. This
was the result of a policy at a public institution that has
decided to use a process meant to protect to rather save
money, with distraught families and harmed children as, to
them, just an unfortunate consequence.
One week till school starts and the Boston Public Schools will
not offer our child a place other then the one that tormented
her, in spite of many letters, in spite of many requests, in
spite of all too many worthless and exhausting meetings. They
know the legal process to fight them is costly, beyond nearly
every Boston Parent's means, they know they can play
bureaucratic games with immigrants and the poor, they know
they the make the most affluent and demanding parents move
away, so in a careful reasoned, but immoral act, they have
decided to fight. Fight each and every family, families
stressed to the limit emotionally, financially and with so
till time. Boston fights each every family who even knows to
ask for their legal right for an appropriate education for
their children.
This is a universal problem, it is system wide. But parents
are too taxed, too exhausted to have the time to lobby and
fight. Beside the hard work of taking care of our complex
children we pay eleven times over. We pay for the services the
school will not provide, we pay real estate taxes, sales
taxes, car taxes, state taxes, federal taxes, we pay for
expertise, we pay for advocates to try to get services, we pay
for legal help, we pay for medical help and still we need one
parent not working just to support our children, and the
schools know this. They know it is easy pickings to fight us.
So then we also pay dearly with our hopes and dream
purposefully and methodically truncated, with the happiness
and future of our child and family shot down, and in our case,
with our only dear child coming home dazed and confused each
day, not getting the critical early interventions that could
effect the quality of her future and our lives for the better
for decades to come, that could offer sociality an employed
citizen rather than a dependent one. Instead we gained
"interventions" that turned a happy girl into one with
unrelenting fears and tears.
Parents drop out out of fear, too little funds, inability to
muster or allocate resources. Those that can muster the
resources to fight, families we know, end up bankrupt, with
nervous breakdowns, exhausted and broken. Why? The Boston
Public School legal team has mastered the art of exhausting
intransigence. And to add to this sin, for we also foot the
bill for them to do this to us all along as well.
It is an unspoken tragedy, a too little talked about tragedy,
yet the schools continue to get away with it. Every one seems
to have heard a story from some parent, everyone who heard a
story shows shock and disbelief, but the overall pattern is
not public. The few that know the overall pattern are members
of the BPS legal team and they use there wide experience, at
every step, to squash the hopes and desires of tenderfoot, new
coming parents, distraught and with the chronic sadness of
recent discoveries that their hoped for perfect child will
not, perhaps ever, be perfect. These parents, caught between
the love of their child and the purposeful intransigence of a
bureaucracy, have their hearts torn asunder, and no one seems
to know.
I have been accused by BPS bureaucrats of not accepting my
daughter's disability. Our experts have been blocked from
talking to our daughter's teacher on the supposed grounds the
individual experts were hated, when in reality all
administrators wanted was to cover up the emotional violence
being done to our daughter. We were systemically discouraged
from viewing the class. I overheard the principal saying to
the teacher, "the parents will never know as they are bussing
their child here." In fact the school goes so far as to
reprimanded parents when they exchange contact information on
school grounds. Their goal is to continually divide and
conquer. Taking advantage anew of each family's ignorance.
I am not a lawyer, perhaps one might tell me, but these seem
violations of civil rights, constitutional rights, disability
and education laws, perhaps other civil and criminal laws,
violations that need to be made public. The voices of all
parents with similar distress need to be heard. The pattern
and picture of what is going on needs to be made public. If
only someone would create a forum for this communication to
happen, I am sure the outpouring of voices and tears would be
deafening.
I am asking you please be a part of the solution. It is the
right and moral thing to do. You can start by sending this
email to friends, media and leaders. (Including the attached
individual story would be great.) It is time to take this
hidden atrocity and make it public. This is especially
pertinent now for Boston, when a new superintendent of schools
will be chosen this year. Will we get more of the same?
This is pertinent not only in Boston, as parents all over the
US are having similar experiences, but to date they have no
unity of voice. We all need to share. This is a country wide
problem. Some schools are great. But there are systems that
have decided to fight the most vulnerable of families. This is
a sin. In this area Cambridge and Somerville follow strategies
similar to Boston.
I have attached our story. You can read it if you would like.
Two weeks to go till school and we do not have a place for our
daughter. We have promised her she would never return to the
school that tormented her. Two other principals of BPS schools
we feel good about have offered to take her. They have stated
there is space. But this space is controlled by the Special
Education central office. BPS will not work with our desires,
they will not do what is best for our daughter, they would
rather do whatever they can to fight us. As the dirty little
roomer goes, to BPS, parents of children with special needs
are the enemy. Too many schools can only see these laws as a
burden they do not want. Law's without adequate education as
to the intent of the laws, leads to the horrific attitudes
such as the one BPS's Special Education Bureaucracy has.
It is maybe hard for others to understand what it means to
support a child who finds doing what is easy for every other
child a major hurdle. But I am sure you understand what it
means to have a bureaucracy that wants to fight you every step
of the way. Well, put these two together, and this is hardly
the recipe for the American dream. We do love our children,
enormously, but reaching out your hand for help to where the
law demands and common sense suggests, and having it bitten,
again and again, is just wrong.
Thank you very much for listening.
Kind regards and appreciation,
Barry Grushkin, a parent
BLG23@Cornell.edu
