Don’t mess with my kid

Beth Moss sits in a coffee shop, wearing a dark blue Special Olympics windbreaker, clutching a coffee cup between her hands. No makeup, just a clear blue stopwatch adorns her wrist. Save for her short red pixie cut, her appearance is noticeably plain, fatigued even, despite the tiny jolt of caffeine she’s delicately sipping on.

Moss occasionally glances at her stopwatch, watching the digital numbers dissolve into themselves as the time between this meeting with me and her next appointment slowly collide.

Every phrase she utters is punctuated with a light molasses-like Southern drawl that adds an instant sense of warmth to whatever she says. Then again, whenever she talks about Garner, you can’t help but feel a mother’s warmth.

The first day she brought her son Garner, who has autism, to kindergarten at their neighborhood school in Oakridge, Tenn., she felt the familiar heartache any mother leaving her child feels — helplessness. She dropped him off at the classroom, which opened up to an outside courtyard. As she walked away, leaving her nearly non-verbal son behind, the teacher swung the classroom door open and yelled across the courtyard, “Beth, come and get him — I can’t get anything done with him in this classroom.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rDmNo17Zq4[/youtube]

Horrified, she took Garner’s hand in hers and led her son away from his first day of school, through the crowd of other parents, with her head held high.

Instead of letting anger and frustration force Garner to attend a nearby segregated school for other children with disabilities, Moss continued to fight to put him in the school’s general education classroom.

“I literally had stomach aches when I walked into the school,” Moss says. “The principal made me feel like they were going way over and above what they needed to do, but they didn’t have any kind of professional development. We paid for all the professional development for the staff.”

“He [the principal] had a two-drawer file cabinet next to his desk and the bottom file was labeled ‘Garner,’” she says. “And he would pull it out and say, ‘this is what we do for him,’ and I would say, ‘but it’s not working.’”

After Garner finished third grade, Moss and her husband decided they couldn’t stay in a school system that wouldn’t willingly provide support for their son. However, they weren’t going to forfeit the fight;  they were going to try tackling the problem from another angle.

Moss heard about the progressive nature of Madison school districts at an autism conference, and kept the location in mind when she searched for a school district that would nurture an inclusive environment for Garner not only in elementary school, but throughout high school and beyond.

Disability simply means difference

Segregated schools and separate classrooms used to be the norm for children with disabilities — there were whispers that were never heard — a population neglected and sequestered to workshops or institutions.

Families in the Madison school district, though, decided this quarantine effect wasn’t good enough for their children. They began advocating for inclusive education, a learning opportunity that allows children with mild and severe disabilities to be taught in general education classrooms.

“Disability simply means difference, a difference in learning styles, a difference in the way in which you may move, the way you think, the way you may speak or the way you may communicate,” says Dr. Alice Udvari-Solner, a faculty associate and researcher in the UW Department of Curriculum and Instruction and also a national consultant in the area of inclusive education. “The only way for people to learn to interact in positive ways is to have the opportunity to interact.”

Though the intent is to include all children who fall on each end of the disability spectrum, students who have severe disabilities still tend to receive the majority of their instruction in the special education setting, according to Udvari-Solner.

With the help of grassroots advocacy, Madison is now nationally recognized for its inclusive education practices and is a model district for implementing the practice of inclusion for other districts across the country. And with such a reputation, it’s no surprise that more and more families —  like Beth Moss’ family — are coming to Madison.

I envision a world

"Seeing us advocate on Erika's behalf, I think McKenna and Luke realize that's a very important thing to do and it's given them the confidence to stand up for people who are less fortunate," Lisa says. Photo by Lukas Keapproth

Eight years ago in Madison, a group of mothers met at a coffee shop.

Wanting to do more for their disabled children’s education, they created the Madison Partners for Inclusive Education, and set out to harness the district’s resources and to spur the school administrators to invest in their children’s educations differently.

“We were kind of beating our heads against the wall because we were all running into the same problems, just at different times and maybe in different schools,” says Lisa Pugh, one of the founding members. Pugh and her family moved from Wichita, Kan., so her daughter, Erika, who has autism, could begin her education in an inclusive setting by the time she was old enough to attend school. “Madison definitely has a different value base for students with disabilities.”

Pugh’s drive to improve Erika’s education has translated to the rest of her children, especially her eldest daughter, McKenna.

When she was 11, McKenna testified at a Madison School Board meeting, urging members to reconsider the possibility of cutting special education funding. She participated in panel discussions with other siblings about the effect of having sisters and brothers with special needs, and she won a national competition for a commercial she created for Assistive Technology, which are devices that help people with disabilities communicate.