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Show Patty wears her hearing aid with pride. She begins to cry when the battery goes dead or when it has been forgotten for some reason. She uses the threat of removing or throwing it as a way of warning us of its magical powers. Her expressive signing comes alive when requesting adjustments of volume or the microphone or picking up new sounds she has not experienced before. The sounds have broadened her world by leaps and bounds. She has found a new toy to take the place of stimulating herself, by lightly flicking her fingertips over the hairs on her face and hands. Thanksgiving had come. A time where in most schools the teacher drags out her well-preserved-decorations and plans units on pumpkins and the pilgrims on plymouth rock. It is so far away from Patty's world, this thanksgiving business. And vacations are always the most difficult time of year at our school. The children either go to a good home and have to keep living over and over again the partings from their family, or they go to not so good homes where some regression of their progress is inevitable. And some very few of the most unlucky ones go to a thing called "respite care,* which is an odd term meaning either a group home or a warehouse babysitter. Since they are not the year-round responsibility of the institution, they are often not provided with services. "Services" meaning an educational program, home living program, or vocational program over summers and holidays. Under such conditions the amount of regression is unjudglible. All of our children come from areas where adequate educational programs do not exist for them. Regression is the child's right,in a way. It is the only way of protest open to him. There was a new rule that year. It is so very hard for educators to keep up with legislator's concepts of education that laws sometimes float about for months before they are discovered and clarified. Fortunately, we had a very careful social worker who knew all the latest rules. Model programs are always ' the first to require '"model" rules. "Students who are wards of the state or placed in respite care under the custody of their parents must return to their respite care facilities on all designated homegoings including all holidays and summer vacation." -14- |
