When people ask me if I’m in special ed. I get embarrassed. I’m afraid they’re going to make fun of me or laugh. Sometimes I just say “Yeah.” They ask me why and I say because I’m slow. I used to get laughed at. – Cheri, learning disabled
At first it was real scary being with regular kids because I’d been at a school where all the kids had problems like mine. But after everybody got used to me and I got used to them, I started to love regular school. Having friends who understand makes all the difference in the world. It makes you feel free.
– Antoinette, blind
I don’t like it in this school. I would prefer to be with deafpeople. I don’t try out for sports and I would in a deaf school. The hearing students repress the deaf students. I’m tired of being in a hearing school.
– Rebecca, deaf
I remember interacting in school with other kids who were disabled, kids who had clubfoot or were severely bowlegged. We were all the butt of everyone’s ridicule and exclusion. There was a camaraderie among us because we were mutually hurt. … That’s had an influence on my life.
– Ann, blind
At a special school, they treat you differently. Like ifyou don’t do something, it’s ok, you don’t have to try. In regular school they encourage
you. They say, “You should try it. You never know.”
– Martha, post-polio
In the regular school I was stuck with able-bodied kids who had never seen a kid in braces before. I wasn’t treated as a girl. This was very painful to me, because I hung around with a group of boys who were really my good friends. They treated me like one of the fellows, and I did not feel like one.
– Victoria, cerebral palsy
In the school for the blind, I didn’t like it that I was only with a lot of blind kids. But I needed that school: I needed the braille skills, the mobility training. The school had its good points and bad points. It was hard to be back at 10 o’clock on Friday and Saturday nights as a teenager. You couldn’t spend the night even if you had your parents’ permission.
But, I had really started to fall behind in my math in the regular school even though I have an aptitude for it. Math is very visual and without special aids you can’t get it. In the school for the blind I was able to make up two years in one.
Then I went to a high school that has been mainstreaming kids with disabilities for twenty-five years. Nearly every teacher in that school has had a blind kid in their class at least once over the years. And since the school is set in a community where disabled people are very visible, the non-disabled kids in the school are more aware and accepting than in other schools probably.
The only really bad school was four years ofgrade school I spent in a country school in a multi-handicapped class. I had a couple of hours of math and spelling a week. The rest of the time was spent watching TV and playing scrabble and ping pong. That’s the truth.
– Margie, blind
When I arrived at the school for the deaf when I was 10 years old, all I knew how to do was to spell my name and count. That was it. My previous teachers in regular schools had passed me because they didn’t know what to do with me. In the deaf school I learned to sign and finally began to understand what was going on in the world.
– Lois, deaf
I envy the mainstreaming of the educational system today. When I first attended school, the only other disabled person I knew of throughout all of my pre-college years, was a girl with leukemia in high school. Even then, I was not aware of it until she had passed away and I read about her in the dedication o f our yearbook. Nowadays, there are more and more disabilities mainstreaming into the schools and it is not as isolating as it used to be.
– Missy, hard of hearing
