Miracle Boy Grows Up Read Online Free Page A

Dad and Alec with souvenirs—a brightly-colored pinwheel and my hospital ID bracelet. Alec promptly grabbed the pinwheel from my small hand. Mom and Dad scolded him, and he dropped it onto the floor and marched around the apartment in his pajamas singing silly songs in a loud warble. Besides the pinwheel, what he stole from me was the attention. I was powerless to stop him or to retaliate.
    Alec is high energy and prone to what Mom calls temper tantrums. Mom says it’s because I get so much attention from her and Dad. In turn, I get Alec’s attention by doing funny voices and resorting to creative name-calling. I make him laugh.
    “Why are you such a freak?” I say with stealthy calm.
    “Am I fr-r-r-r-eaky? Freaky! Freaky! Freaky!” “See?”
    “At least I’m not a Stu-ball, like you.”
    “I’m not stupid!”
    But my heart isn’t in it. Maybe I am stupid.
    “I didn’t say ’stupid,’ Retard. But I’ll bet you don’t know how much sixteen times sixteen is?”
    He seems so impossibly strange. So different from me. So aggressive. And probably smarter. Alec is eight and goes to a good school where he learns French and reads big books. I’m still five and can’t read. I would be going to Alec’s school, L’École Française , on the Upper East Side, but this elite institution refuses to take a kid in a wheelchair. Architectural obstacles abound, and who can predict what effect my presence may have on the other kids? It’s 1968, and it’s still legal to discriminate against the handicapped.
    According to government statistics, only one in five handicapped kids is educated in a public school at that time—usually a separate special-ed school. The majority stays home or gets sent off to live-in institutions. More than a million handicapped kids have no access to the school system at all. Many states have statutes specifically excluding the deaf, blind or mentally retarded from public schooling. This despite the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which addressed the need for equity for “educationally deprived children,” as President Johnson puts it when he signs it into law. A year later the Act is amended to establish a federal Bureau of Education of the Handicapped and, under Title VI, special funding to accommodate handicapped students. This basically fueled special-ed, not inclusion or “mainstreaming” in regular schools. Not until September 26, 1973—when I’m ten years old and starting sixth grade—do handicapped kids begin to gain the right to an integrated, quality education, with passage of the US Rehabilitation Act. Its Section 504 will prohibit discrimination based on disability in educational facilities that receive federal funding. Two years later, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act will put federal money where its mouth is by supporting state efforts to improve schooling for handicapped kids. It will set no clear national standards, however, and follow-through will be slack. So fifteen years after that—in 1990, when I’m already out of college for six years—the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act will set terms for full integration in public schools of all kids with disabilities, to the fullest extent possible. Soon some six million kids with disabilities will attend public schools, receiving specialized services as needed to meet their educational requirements.
    Though not held to the same standard unless they receive federal funds, private schools will gradually try, at least, to follow the example of their public counterparts.
    Mom and Dad are way ahead of their time in refusing to have me segregated. In fact, they raise me in isolation from other handicapped kids. Or rather, they protect me from them. I don’t want to be around other kids like me anyway, mostly because they are not like me. At least I don’t see myself as being like them. I figure if I’m being separated from them, there’s got to be a reason. There’s got to be something