FLK was marked on his permanent record. FLK stands for Funny-Looking Kid.
The boy did look odd. His nose looked like it had been broken and not reset. When he talked, he sometimes made a honking sound, as if he was holding his nose. Some of the bones in his arms were fused, and he had webbing between his toes. When he stood with his arms at rest, they hung about 5-6" from his sides. He couldn’t move his elbows through the normal range, so when he walked, he took up twice the space that he should have. His arms frequently hit things or people when space was tight. He had trouble holding down a piece of paper and writing on it at the same time, because he couldn’t bring his hands together without discomfort. Minor physical anomalies, a school social worker had written a few years back, along with a note about likely retardation.
That wasn’t all. At 7, he was the biggest kid in his second grade class, and his school was worried. A call requesting his evaluation had said little about his unusual physical anomalies. His school didn’t know what to do with him. They were scared of him, the principal had said. I had to test him, and I was warned he’d be dangerous.
Dangerous? A 7-year-old?
The evaluation was intended to confirm how aggressive the boy was. The principal knew the boy had trouble concentrating, but thought he was "mentally deficient", and dangerous, incapable of controlling his violence. I was informed that the boy sought out opportunities to hit other children. Furthermore, he was from a family of known sub-normal intelligence, living on welfare.
However, when I met the boy’s mother, I learned she was a cafeteria worker. She was not on welfare as I’d been told. She’d been taken out of school after 6th grade, because she couldn’t read. Nonetheless, she had a regular job that she’d held for several years, and she had managed to buy a tiny little house for herself and her son. I confirmed that she had no supervision, no caseworker, and no public support. The boy’s father had died several years ago, and mother and son lived alone, rather isolated from other people. She didn’t seem to be seriously slow, but mostly undereducated, with severe difficulties with reading and a low opinion of her own abilities. She didn’t like the school, because she was scared to go there. It was the same school she’d attended not so long ago.
The boy was always getting into fights, and he didn’t understand why. He described recent trouble he’d had: "There we were, me touching first base, trying to steal second, and the next thing I knew, the other kid was on the ground, and there I was, on my way to the principal’s office again." The first baseman – the other kid – had said something about the boy’s mother. The boy didn’t remember the insult, but the kid he knocked to the ground admitted that he’d called the boy’s mother a "retard".
When I tested the boy, I discovered he was easy to work with. His bone abnormalities, however, kept him from doing tasks as fast and as well as he might have. He had to turn sideways to deal with some of the testing materials I put before him, and this reduced his score somewhat.
Nevertheless, wow! The kid earned a score of 137 on the IQ test. The principal was surprised, but unimpressed. "That simply isn’t possible," he told me. "His mother is retarded. This kid is defective; kids like him don‘t have high IQs. You are just a trainee, aren’t you?"
Well, not exactly. I’d been working with school children for 8 years. No matter, the principal had said. They had already made plans for the boy. They just needed to have him assessed. They didn’t ask for his assessment, so they weren’t worried about what my report said. They didn’t care about my recommendations. Who was they, I asked?
I had recommended treatment, but not what the school expected. The second grade room was a tiny portable building, chock full with 34 kids. When the boy had to walk to the pencil sharpener, or coat closet, or rest room, or up to the teacher’s desk, his arms stuck out from his shoulders, and bumped other kids. With the boy hitting them again and again, many students reacted by hitting the boy back. They assumed his wide-angle stance was deliberate, and hostile. The boy couldn’t change this, because his bones wouldn’t rotate. In addition, the boy’s activity level was indeed very high. His teacher said that the boy almost always finished his work very quickly and wanted to get up and wander over to the class science center, though she admitted that he was almost always correct in his work. Nonetheless, the boy’s grades were low, because of the chronic messiness of his work.
I thought the boy should be in a larger, and more challenging classroom. His school had a program for high ability children, conveniently housed in a large room in the main school building. However, the teacher and principal adamantly opposed this, saying that the boy couldn’t possibly keep up, nor did he deserve to be in that program.
My most important recommendation was not in the realm of education or psychology. There was a Shriner’s hospital in a nearby city, which would see the boy at no cost, correcting his physical difficulties as much as possible. I spoke to the boy’s pediatrician, asking why they had not referred this boy to the Shriner's Hospitals." Oh, he’s a retarded kid," said the doc. "It doesn’t matter to him – he’s just like his mother, very slow. We need to reserve treatment for the kids who will really benefit," he said, winking at me as he conveyed these words of wisdom.
The school’s plans? The boy was to be placed in an orphanage! (Yes, there are still some out there.) The school officials had a plan to get the boy’s mother to give up her paternal rights. They were going to hint at legal action if she didn’t give her permission to send the child away. I suspected she’d be given papers to sign that she likely wouldn’t be able to read. My objections were interpreted as wanting the boy to be placed in a residential psychiatric facility. The principal told me, as he winked: "We shouldn’t spend taxpayer money on kids like him. He’s never going to amount to anything; he’ll always be a drain, likely end up in prison, anyway. Just look at his mother. She doesn’t pay any taxes!"
So there it was: A poor kid, with genuine disabilities, was not given anything like the treatment he needed or deserved. Rather, the boy was being thrown away. He was being treated unfairly through a set of perceptions that were laced with prejudice. Legally, his mother should have been consulted on any plans made to test the boy and to make decisions about his future education. He needed an Individual Education Plan (IEP), which would certainly have excluded removing him from school as any initial placement.
Before any discussion was made of putting the boy in a different room, a period of trying out classroom adjustments should have been made, simple things like moving him where he wouldn’t have to walk past other desks to get to needed supplies and activities; keeping him up front, close to the teacher; and possibly explaining to the class about his difficulties with movement. On the basis of his testing, his teacher should have worked to provide more challenging work for the boy, as boredom may have contributed to the boy’s off-task behavior. Most of all, the principal should have worked to set aside his prejudices toward the boy. These school people – I won’t call them educators – were possessed of a distinct bigotry in their attitude toward this unusual child. And this child's legal rights were tossed aside.
Now, it is easy to think that this child was being thrown away because he did not look or act like a regular kid. However, a child with these same problems, but with more affluent parents, would never be tossed away like this boy. The primary problem for this boy was poverty.
As was true for this boy, poverty is too often perceived as the fault of the poor, or the inevitable result of genetically determined laziness, passed down through the generations. The current ethos stresses families as being totally responsible for children’s welfare. The concept of helping children and their families in order to serve the common good is under attack, as poverty is widely considered to be intractable. As this viewpoint goes, help is either wasted on genetically produced poverty, or it provides an incentive for lazy people to be even lazier. Children like this boy, in families who don’t meet middle class "standards", are not of great concern: It’s as if the children are responsible for doing a poor job in picking their parents.
With those kinds of prejudgments of poor children, it’s easy for some people to be unconcerned about the rights that a poor child and his family have to expect and receive an appropriate education, consistent with federal law. Any evidence that those preconceived low expectations are wrong, is too easily dismissed. Fortunately for the prejudiced, poor people don’t vote in sufficient numbers for politicians to worry much. So politicians speak to the middle class, with few exceptions – doing anything else is perceived as unwise.
As long as poverty is considered impossible to change, and poor parents and children are left with few resources, poor children with difficulties will be thrown away, in one way or another. Those children, and our society, will be the worse for that.