The Birth of Super Crip Read Online Free PDF Page A

elevator in A-wing of the high school for junior year.”
     
    “You want an elevator in A-wing and B-wing?” Pete
quipped, making a face as if to suggest that was the most
outlandish thing he’d ever heard. “What’s wrong with you?”
     
    “Or they could just connect both hallways upstairs,”
Red shot back. “It is 1992. I hear it’s being done.”
     
    “Dude, the halls are only connected indoors on one
end of the building down -stairs,” Pete said. “You expect the
same luxury up -stairs. You damn disabled people just want
everything, don’t ya?”
     
    They both smiled briefly at the ongoing joke.
“Seriously, why were you late?”
     
    Red shrugged. “I was talking to Alley for a minute
near the end of class,” he said. “So I didn’t leave early enough
and the bell rang just as I got down the stairs to my wheelchair.
Everybody was already leaving class and it took forever to get
through the hallway.”
     
    “I don’t see why they can’t move that class
downstairs,” Pete said.
     
    “I heard some BS that the computers could get stolen
easier,” Red said. “I don’t know. I guess they look at it like
moving your science lab. Too hard.”
     
    “Bonnie give you any crap?”
     
    “Not really, but I think I made her late for her
third period of the day of doing nothing.”
     
    “I thought Mr. Nicklaus had that covered.”
     
    “Li’l Nicky?” Red asked sarcastically. “He’s busy
working on his doctorate this period.”
     
    They couldn’t even muster a laugh at their own
sarcasm about the resource room staff. They had been worn down in
their first two years of dealing with the teacher and aide, who
often refused to perform the most basic duties of working in the
mainstreaming program. Smoothing out problems with regular
education teachers who balked at giving students with disabilities
extra time to do tests or in-class assignments, assisting students
with lunch, and helping them get materials from the library, were
just a few of the things Mr. Nicklaus and Bonnie had put back on
the students with the excuse that they “were in high school now”
and needed to do things on their own. As freshmen, Red and the
others arriving from middle school quickly learned that complaining
to their parents only made things worse.
     
    The program was run by the county—not the school
district—which meant the staff reported to the principal of
Sunshine Lane. So, parental complaints to the high school
administration were met with empathy, followed by explanations that
there was nothing they could do. Phone calls to the Sunshine Lane
principal merely lead to him relaying the message to Mr. Nicklaus.
Even when the message came with a directive for Mr. Nicklaus to
make a change, it was generally ignored since his boss wasn’t in
the building to compel him to do things differently.
     
    In fact, the order to do something about a particular
problem would generally make things worse. The entire class watched
as one of the most egregious examples of the staff’s disregard for
the students played out during Red’s freshman year. One of the
seniors almost flunked his final semester of English due to the
fact that he was struggling with the physical demands of doing
research for a required paper. He had muscular dystrophy, and
couldn’t independently get books off the shelves in the library.
When his father called to complain, saying his son needed more time
in the library than the two periods a week that Bonnie would help
him—even though the student had a daily resource room period in
which the aide wasn’t helping anyone else—the aide suddenly began
taking her lunch during the student’s period in the room. Mr.
Nicklaus refused to help the student in the library, claiming it
wasn’t his job as a teacher, and said that the aide could take
lunch whenever she wanted. The father had to help his son at their
local library in the evening so the student could complete his
paper on time.
     
    Red’s