Story of the Day 11/11/2010

A Series of Unfortunate Events is a fairly good series of children’s books, and the title of a really delightful and somewhat wacky movie. Unfortunately, when it is the message that you receive on your cell phone , at 10:30 in the morning, from your daughter’s high school Resource teacher, with the added imperative to call her, soon, preferably before 11:30, it is not delightful.

When my cell phone rang, at 10:30, I was driving a friend
I had just picked up at her doctor’s office, to Meijer’s to get her new prescriptions filled. Since I do not talk on the phone, the teacher left me a message, the one described above, which I promptly listened to, right after parking the car outside the store.
And, then like any good and very worried parent, I called her back.

The story started before school, in Carmel.
Carmel, incidentally, is not the same town as the high school is in.
There was a fire at the Dunkin Donuts, and a distracted driver bumped his car into Sarah’s interpreter’s car. Thankfully, there was no real damage to the interpreter, or her car, but the other driver insisted on stopped, pulling over and calling the police. That was the first unfortunate event .

The second event was that Sarah’s Hebrew teacher was absent, so there was a sub- a substitute teacher. This was not unexpected. Mr. Cohen had announced to the class a few days earlier, but it was …unfortunate.

So, when Sarah walked into her first period class, Hebrew, and took her seat expecting the interpreter to show up….the interpreter didn’t. And because it was s sub , the person in charge of eth class was left alone in charge of a class with a Deaf student.

As Sarah sat there, the teacher took attendance. At least, it appeared to Sarah that she did. Her mouth moved, and it appeared that the other students were responding. At some point, having run through whatever it was, the teacher looks very pointedly at Sarah and says several things. Sarah assumed it was her name and a stream of other words. Sarah responded by writing a note for the teacher. She wrote” I cannot hear anything. I am deaf. My name is Sarah Margolis-Greenbaum.”

A couple of minutes after this, the sub walked over to Sarah’s desk, put a stack of papers down in front of her, and preceded to tell her what to do – using Spoken English.
Apparently, this sub was not an especially bright person.

Sarah looked at the papers, and saw there were various student’s names on them and assumed she was supposed ot hand them out. Unfortunately, Sarah has been in this class for most of the semester with an interpreter who was totally incompetent, so Sarah knows the names of exactly two other students. One is a boy she has known for many years, and the other is a girl whose name is Mahlah, or Malah, or Milah , or Mihal- depending on what the interpreter decided to sign that day. The interpreter didn’t’ bother with any of the other names.

So, Sarah , realizing there was no way to complete this task, tried to give the stack of papers back to the sub. The sub responded by getting angry at Sarah, pressing the papers right back on her desk and saying some things with a rather nasty look on her face.

Fortunately, and this was the one fortunate event in the series, another student decided to take it upon herself to take the stack and hand out the papers.

At this point, Sarah was worried about the absence of the interpreter, and rather stressed by being ill-treated by the sub. So, she wrote a note explaining that she wanted to go see the Resource teacher and find out where the interpreter was.
To this, the sub responded “You don’t’ really require an interpreter for my class.”

This was unfortunate event…four…five? Who knows. But it was very unfortunate- for Sarah- but also for the school- since this sub was representing them.

Sarah, of course being substantially more intelligent than the sub responded, “No, my IEP requires having an interpreter for my communication (accessible).”

The sub wrote that she thought Sarah would be fine for this period and could hold her questions for when Mr. Cohen returned….next week.

At this point Sarah realized the sub might have a cognitive disability and thought that using the word please and sorry might help the sub to think more clearly.
This approach, however, met with the sub grabbing the paper away from Sarah while she was writing.
Apparently, Sarah knows a great deal more about polite behavior than the sub.

Again, Sarah tried to explain to the sub that she didn’t just need the interpreter for this one class, but it was an issue for the rest of her classes.
I think I can adequately paraphrase the sub's response as , “Too bad!”

Finally, Sarah wrote a note to the sub saying “ But this is an emergency. So please can I go to her ( the resource teacher’s) room?” To this, the sub rudely turned and walked away.

Sarah’s response was to pick up her backpack and leave.

Now. I lied a little at the beginning of this story.
You see, the very first in the series of unfortunate events actually occurred 8 years ago, to Sarah’s brother.

Sarah’s brother was a student at the middle school, when he was rather poorly treated by a substitute teacher who punished him for being deaf. It was actually a worse situation than what happened to Sarah , today.
As a result, the school developed a policy of attaching a sheet explaining which students in a class needed accommodations to the sub folders ( the folders given to the substitute teachers for each class.)
When it was time for him to move on to the high school, I asked if we needed to readdress this- and I was told that it was a policy in the high school to do this ( following the first unfortunate event/ incident).
So, the very first of the series of unfortunate events occurred 8 years ago, and the second was when, today, no paper was attached to the sub folder- in violation of what I was told was the school’s policy.
And, yes, I asked, so I know that no paper was given to the sub.

The charming detail that is embedded in this is that the school was previously aware that this was an issue and had informed me that they had a policy in place to ensure these things would not happen. But, obviously, they didn’t do what they were supposed to do, so they were the ones who caused that first domino to fall. And it is really and truly an odd thing, in this series, that this happened to the one student whose mother would know there was supposed to be a policy in place and why, and that the school had ample precedent to know this could happen……..

As I drove my husband home, this evening, from the airport, and told him about the day’s events, his response was they really owe her an apology.”