I said it didn't matter. And I'd convinced myself that it didn't. So had my daughter, Lauren. We both insisted it was no big deal.
My granddaughter, Lucy, would be going to the Dean S. Luce School for first grade. Not John F. Kennedy, the closer neighborhood school where her mother and aunt and uncle had all gone, which she could walk to by herself when she got a little older, where the whole family had sat through dozens of plays and concerts and "bring your parents to lunch" days and holiday celebrations and end-of-the-year relay races.
She'd be going to a different school, a few miles away.
But so what? we said. First grade is first grade. Location doesn't matter. It's a good school. All the teachers know Lucy and like her. She's been a student there for two years, for pre-k and kindergarten. She's comfortable. We're comfortable. She's made friends. Some of them will be in her first-grade class. It's all good, we said. We're good. We're great!
That's what we told ourselves. And that's what we told everyone else, because that is what we thought we believed.
And then the director of special education for all the schools in the district announced that Lucy would be going to Kennedy.
She'd been assigned there, he said. She would be the first child with Down syndrome to attend the school. The teachers were a little nervous but were thrilled to be getting her and her aide. They were looking forward to meeting her and teaching her and working with the Massachusetts Down Syndrome Teacher's Partnership Network.
Being Accepted
It was a wow moment, a dream we didn't even know we had. And it had come true. Something as simple as Lucy going to her neighborhood school, taking part in this ordinary rite of passage, being included and part of a bigger whole, put Lucy's mom and dad and aunts and uncles and both sets of grandparents and her Great Auntie Anne and so many of her friends over the moon.
We have to fight for Lucy sometimes, for all sorts of things, like being able to progress from pre-k to kindergarten, like being able to attend kindergarten for a full day, like being able to learn in a classroom with her peers.
We didn’t fight for Lucy to go to the Kennedy. The news that she would, arrived like an unexpected gift.
Not too long ago — just a few decades — children with Down syndrome were deemed uneducable by experts who had never even tried to teach them. They were put in institutions and clothed and fed, but not taught.
Most people today know better. Most people know that children with Down syndrome do learn. But there's still this lingering belief that they can learn and do only so much. So many people, even some who should know better, continue to underestimate them. Once, when Lucy was a baby, her mother took her to an eye doctor in our town who said her eyes were just fine. But if they weren't — if she couldn’t see — it wouldn’t much matter, "considering her condition."
Onward, Upward
Lucy will be going to school in the fall. She'll be with the little girls next door and the two older girls from down the street, and she'll have lunch in the cafeteria with everyone else and play in the playground with everyone else and be part of a tradition that began for our family 35 years ago, on a sunny September morning when my son waved goodbye on his way to school.
I think I have told everyone I know this good news. Lucy will be starting first grade. Imagine! I have said over and over and over.
It's called "inclusion," and it's what everyone wants — to be part of something. To fit in. To belong.
Share with your grandkids the inspiring story of a child's special love for her sister who has Down syndrome.
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