Some time ago, trending on the local Facebook was a miserable story that turned unexpectedly delightful, and about building community. The clickbait merchants of the grand Internet love this stuff: “Twenty Seconds Into This Clip, Your Heart Will Melt”, and all that.
This particular story was about miserable middle-school behavior, and this time it happened in an actual middle school: here’s a little bullying for you!: the typical stuff that happens in the seventh grade. I’ve taken to sometimes using “seventh-grade” as a pejorative adjective – with due respect to the couple of teachers I had in the seventh grade that did help me to now recall my experience as more than phys-ed awkwardness; more than just that yahoo who lived in locker #280 and delighted in keeping me from getting my stuff from #279. That sort of delightful stuff.
The online story ran thusly: at a middle school basketball game, one of the cheerleaders, named Desiree, took some verbal abuse from at least one wiseacre kid in the crowd, and half the home team came to her rescue. For openers, seventh-grade boys emerging from their sphere of awareness can be a pretty big deal. These particular kids may have been able to use their status as athletes to some greater good; so okay!
The detail in the story that caused this to be a bigger story was the fact that the cheerleader in question had Down Syndrome. In a moment that suggested that in some cases, humanity can separate itself from the rest of its prey-on-the-weak animal kingdom … the spectator who decided it was okay to verbally beat on somebody else (somebody who is dealing with a challenge not of her own making) was put in his place.
Shortly thereafter, the school had renamed the gym “D’s House”, to suggest that Desiree was not only welcome, but she owned the joint the same as anybody else at that school. And did she ever. It was an unofficial re-christening, but at the same time someone had already designed a new logo for a banner that was planned to be ready for the next home game.
The image that caused my eyes to spring a tiny little leak was the photo of Desiree flanked by some of the athletic kids that came to her defense, holding hands with two of them. The caption read, “Now Desiree, who they call Dee, never walks to class alone.”
With luck, this was going to demonstrate to the rest of that Wisconsin school, and to the rest of the online hordes who happened across the story, that it’s important to take these kinds of stands sometimes. And to treat people decently.
At this moment, I need to shine a little spotlight on a former workplace of mine.
For most of thirteen years, I taught in the town of Uxbridge, Massachusetts, which is halfway between Worcester and Providence, Rhode Island. As with all towns everywhere, it had its strengths and weaknesses. But one thing its public schools did really well – exceptionally well – was to maintain an environment in which special-needs students were part of the team, like everybody else.
There is much more “mainstreaming” of special-needs kids in public schools than there ever used to be, when I was a student myself – much more inclusion of these students in “regular” classes. It can present an extra challenge for teachers, but I haven’t met any teachers who didn’t throw their entire container of professional expertise at the challenge when it was presented to them (or hit up their learned colleagues for help).
In Uxbridge, while I was at the high school, we did have a few students who were developmentally-challenged enough that they did have their own curriculum, and spent the majority of their school day together, under the tutelage of some genuinely remarkable special-ed teachers. In a subset of the education industry which sees a level of turnover and burnout that can be entirely forgiven – special ed is a hard, hard business to be in – Uxbridge High School had a set of special-ed teachers who had been there long before I was hired. They were devoted to their craft in a way that impressed their “regular ed” colleagues – and probably impressed their students, at least by way of being there at the beginning of every new school year and thus providing a familiar and safe welcome for them.
Additionally, their work impressed the student body. Students rarely actually said, “boy, those special ed teachers do a great job” – but they showed it in the way they treated those developmentally-challenged students.
When those kids ventured out into the hallways, on their way to lunch, or on their way to the rare class into which they had been “mainstreamed’ (not, I should note, needing any escort, at least for protection from bullies) – or, yes, at athletic home games in the gym – I never saw any “regular ed” students giving them a hard time. Nobody made fun of them. Everybody who passed them in the hallways smiled at them, or at least let them go on their way unhindered – and every so often, I got the sense that they were having thoughts like, “yeah, maybe this quiz I’m about to flunk isn’t the biggest problem anyone ever had and I should get over myself a little.”
So, bravo to the Wisconsin seventh-grade basketball-playing boys who made their school quite a bit better just by doing the right thing. Sounds to me as if they’d changed the culture of their school. I hope that their actions led to other people doing other decent things, treating other people well, et cetera.
But a gentle shout-out, again, to my former colleagues back in Uxbridge, who – however they did it – figured out how to create that kind of atmosphere a long, long time ago, such that it didn’t require an extra special, clickbait-worthy effort. It was just how ya did things.
-Rob Hammerton
Sudbury UMC Lenten Devotions 