After
two years of meetings with the teachers and the advocates, I got what
I wanted. I got a computer in every room and all of the resources
that I needed. It was all great, except I didn’t really feel normal
where I was at. So even though I got what we fought for, I decided to
go back to Shrine School. In the sixth grade, we would try again to
mainstream me, but this time I would only go to another school for
one class. So in fifth grade, I went to the school right next to mine
which happened to be one of the roughest schools around. It was
clearly not a good environment for me to be in. I took French 101.
Everything was working out the way it should be. I got good grades, I
made friends in my class, the teachers really liked me being there.
But one day I was going back to the elevator on my walker. The walker
I was using at that time went on the back of you, not the front. Just
as I was getting ready to get out of the elevator, the halls were
crowded with people and somebody ran down the hall and ran into my
back and I fell flat on my face. It fractured my nose. After that
accident, my mainstream days were over. From that time on throughout
my high school years I went to Shrine School.
LEARNING
HOW TO BE WHOLE IN SCHOOL
High
school was really fun because the classes were so small that you
didn’t have to move at a quick pace. I remember spending a whole
nine months on just the Holocaust. I would not trade those classes
for anything in the world. They were the best times because they
taught me history and other subjects that I would not have gotten
that deep into if I went to another school. A lot of what I learned
was not what you would learn until you went to college because we had
the time to go through it as much as we wanted to. I remember a
classmate and I were really into the Civil War. Our teacher tried to
teach us about all the generals that you don’t normally hear about.
I’ll say it again, those classes shaped the rest of my life.
Because
of the fact that we were such a little school, we went to prom every
year to make it feel more like a party because there was only a few
of us. Whereas everyone else only got 1 prom, I got 4. On top of all
this, I had occupational and physical therapy two times a week at my
school. It would require that I got into the pool once a week to
loosen up my muscles. We also had field day once a year. What was
really cool about field day was we competed against each other just
like a normal kids would. Since we were all disabled in some kind of
way, we didn’t have any sympathy for the guy in the wheelchair or
the guy with the helmet or the one on the walker. In a lot of ways,
it helped me grow because it made me think that I was not special and
I was not the fragile being everybody told me I was.
