Eight Year Old Girl Handcuffed at School

 

Our friend Ruth over at Wheelie Catholic has a disturbing post with links to many sites devoted to reactions in the asperger's communities and I urge my readers to see what's going on. Briefly Evelyn Towry, 8 years old was judged by teachers and school administrators to be sufficiently out of control to warrant calling the police. As I say, you can read more about this apalling story over at Ruth's site.

in Charles Dickens' famous novella "A Christmas Carol" the ghost representing the hypothetical future   shows Scrooge two starving orphans hidden beneath his cloak. They are labeled ignorance and want. Or something like that. I could look it up but I'm not going to. My point in this instance is that our public schools are one vast unfunded mandate where children with disabilities are concerned. This fact doesn't excuse the mishandling of Evelyn Towry's situation but it explains how such an inexcusable and dehumanizing event can occur. Teachers don't have enough classroom support or special education training;administrators who have little or no ability to fund anything imagine that the police are the only resort.

Abuse is abuse and young Evelyn Towry and her family are in my prayers.

 

S.K.

Comments

[Ruth]

Hi Connie - Hi Steve!

I was noticing Bill Peace's comment on another post about disability and higher education and the differences in universities as well.

I agree with you that education is vastly underfunded and this is an explanation for how this kind of situation arises. In many cases, the paperwork gets done- IEP's - because they have to. IEP's for students are then, in many instances, used as the "catch all" to deal with any issue a child with a disability has, yet often staff (the team) comes into IEP meetings with the forms already filled out. When this happens and parents have very little input, more conflicts arise that don't get resolved. Although in this case the conflict became public, unresolved issues become the norm, a state of tension that parents and children with disabilities live with based on the lack of resources and lack of priority given to education.