Carly’s Voice (42 page)

Partway through the school year at Carlton, Howard cautiously tested the water with
us about public school once again. “What if we could find a school near Carlton where
she could go to one class per week. Just to try it,” he mused.

“Howard, you are like a piece of sand in an oyster,” I said.

He smiled, knowing it wouldn’t take much for Tammy and me to get started again. Howard
has an uncanny sense of timing, allowing us to rest just long enough to catch our
breath before whipping us up the next hill.

Over the next few months, while I mulled over the possibility, Tammy got to work.
“What about Western?” Tammy asked, referring to the large high school within our district.
We had heard positive reports—despite the complaining about public schools that was
in vogue. This particular school had a broad range of resources including an inclusion
program for kids on the autism spectrum, though to our knowledge none of the students
at Western dangled so far off the edge of the spectrum as Carly.

Looking at the school’s website, Tammy noticed that Dennison Children’s Services,
the government agency that had helped provide respite and funding support for Carly
over the years, had on-site counseling services for students at the school. She immediately
called our social worker at the main office to inquire if they could help.

Within a few weeks, we had a meeting scheduled with a counselor, and the principal,
Elaine Abrams, as well as a special education representative from the school board
and one of the special education teachers at the school.

“Okay, now that we have a meeting, we need to figure out what we’re going to say,”
Tammy said to us several days after she spoke with Steve.

“I have a game plan. You will have to wait and see,”
responded Carly.

Tammy looked at Howard, inquisitively.

“She’s fine,” he said. “She’s writing out her request.”

On a warm fall day in 2009, just after the start of the traditional school year, Howard,
Tammy, Carly, and I walked through the front entrance of Western feeling like the
Little Rock Nine. We had not often felt welcome in the public school system in the
past, so despite the encouragement of Western’s principal this time around, we remained
on guard. Carly was assured a place in public school by law. That wasn’t the concern.
She wanted to be in a mainstream school,
and the school board was required only to provide a placement
they
deemed appropriate for her abilities, possibly in a developmentally handicapped classroom.
With Carly’s intelligence and willingness to learn hampered by her behavioral constraints,
finding a spot that made all parties happy had proven impossible in the public school
system. Unlike the U.S., Canada does not pay for private placement when a public classroom
is unavailable. Getting Carly into a mainstream high school with the right support
network had been our dream and our main struggle of the past ten years.

Western, a large gothic building, is often used in the filming of movies and television
shows, as it is the quintessential city high school: imposing and a bit scruffy, but
full of energy. As students drifted from their after-school activities, we waited
in a converted classroom that was used by school staff for conferences and meetings.
The air in the room was heavy with the day’s heat and lack of air conditioning. I
looked distractedly around the room at the mismatched furniture. The west wall of
the long room was a bank of impossibly tall windows covered with blackout curtains
of a mysterious green synthetic material. They sagged in sections, clinging to the
curtain rod for dear life. The tables were arranged in a horseshoe and we took our
seats to one side as our hosts shuffled in.

Elaine strode in last, and with great purpose.

“I’m so sorry to keep you waiting. It’s commencement next week and we have diploma
packages to prepare for almost five hundred graduates,” she explained breathlessly.
Not a tall woman, Elaine nevertheless commanded presence. She introduced the staff
with a confident formality, her posture straight enough to pass a grandmother’s inspection.

“How can we help you?” she asked from her seat at the head of the table.

I suggested that perhaps the best way to articulate what we were
hoping to accomplish for Carly was to let her present her statement. She had been
fighting a cold and was not feeling well. In the heat of the room, she looked like
a melting ice cream cone. “Is that okay, Carly?” Howard asked.

“Ess,” she replied sleepily as Howard opened her laptop and turned it toward Elaine
and her colleagues. Howard opened the document and booted up the software that breathed
voice into Carly’s words. The prepared statement was delivered from the computer in
the familiar monotone:

“It’s funny because I feel the schools are using labels to hold people back. I am
autistic but does that mean I can’t be a part of the same education that someone who
is not autistic gets? If Albert Einstein was around in this century, fifty out of
a hundred doctors say he would be diagnosed with learning disabilities and ADD. The
other fifty say he would have been on the autism spectrum. When Albert went to school
he was in a one classroom school house and was given a chance to learn. His teacher
was quoted saying that Albert did not pay attention to any of the lessons that she
taught him. She went on to say that he had to wear the dunce hat more times than she
put logs in the fireplace. Yet she still gave him an education that led us to E=mc
²
. What if he was born in today’s time and put in a segregated school? Would we know
what E=mc
²
means?

“Stephen Hawking was seven years old when he lost all oral ability in his mouth. He
made lots of sounds but could not talk. Thanks to some amazing teachers that saw the
potential in him, Stephen stayed in a mainstream class and is now one of the smartest
men in the world with a PhD in science and many papers on black hole phenomenon. But
what if the teachers did not let him stay in school? Do you think he really would
have met his potential?

“I am not saying I am going to come up with the next E=mc
²
or write a dissertation on black holes but I would like the one thing these two individuals
and many more like them had and that is a chance. School is about teaching young minds
knowledge and I have proven with my IQ test that I take in all the information that
is given to me. So please help me fill my head with knowledge. I am eager to learn
and eager to put my own stamp on the world. Please help me do so.

“Thank you for listening to me I am willing to answer any questions you may have now.”

A silence hung in the room. The broad metal venetian blinds, hanging awry, swayed
slightly in the stingy breeze.

“Well,” I heard someone say, and I looked up. Howard had the sheepish smile he wears
when he knows Carly has won her point.

It was the end of a long day for everyone and we could see that Carly was fading fast.
“We need to think this through,” said Elaine, finally. “I have a few ideas, but I
need some time.”

She continued, looking directly at Tammy, “I want to make this work. There is a teacher
here who has experience with students on the spectrum. Mostly Asperger’s. And she
teaches a class for our advanced pupils; it’s in our
gifted
program. The course is on modern thought and philosophy. From what I’ve read from
Carly, that might be of interest? If we can make it work out.” She gave herself the
wiggle room.

“How cool is that?” asked Tammy. “Would you like that?”

Carly was slumped against Howard, clearly feeling unwell. But her eyes brightened,
her trademark half smile of self-satisfaction.

“That would be amazing,”
she typed. I smiled at the thought. From an ABA school to a gifted program; that
would
be amazing.

Over the coming months, Elaine worked through the details of how Carly might attend
the class without contravening board or union protocols, which are rigid in Canada.
Carly seemed to draw upon all her resolve, and while she was still not able to write
with her teachers at Carlton, her freak-outs at school dramatically lessened. It was
quid pro quo. We trusted in her to attend high school, and she redoubled her efforts
at controlling herself.

It took until spring 2010 before we finally had permission for what we termed
the experiment
. Carly would attend Ms. Liko’s advanced philosophy class that was just embarking
on a module about psychology—one of Carly’s areas of interest. Two or three times
per week, Howard would pick her up from Carlton and drive her to Western. “If this
goes well,” said Elaine, “over the summer we can talk about whether Carly might be
interested in enrolling at Western full-time.” You could almost feel Carly’s body
vibrate with anticipation.

“How’d it go?” I asked Howard after their first day in class. “Did Carly hold it together?”

“She did. She was amazing. Not a peep. And the class is over an hour long.”

“Were the kids freaked out by her?”

“Not at all. We showed the
20/20
video to help them understand. And these are mature kids. Bright. Mostly grade ten,”
he said.

When Barb showed up later that day, she asked Carly about her first day at school.

“It was very hard and Howard kept on bugging me asking if I wanted to go.”

“We were only supposed to be there for fifteen or twenty minutes for the first day,”
Howard defended himself. “I felt like I had to ask you if you wanted to go.”

“Do you accept that explanation, Carly?” asked Barb.

“If I have to,”
Carly snipped.

“Carly, what strategies did you use today or what were the situations in the class
that made it work today? Knowing may be helpful in the future,” Barb asked.

“I think it was just the fact I kept on telling myself this is my way out of ABA schools.”

“Given that this was hard for you and you had to keep telling yourself to focus, were
you still able to listen to what was being said? Could you still learn?”

“yes,”
Carly replied.

“Did you count at all in your head?” asked Howard, referring to a calming strategy
they had learned to help Carly sit quietly.

“yes”

A few weeks later, Howard reminded Carly that she had to write a letter to the teacher
to give her feedback about finally being allowed to attend a mainstream school. With
a bowl of chips as her encouragement (why isn’t Carly three hundred pounds?), she
girded herself for the task of typing out a letter to her new teacher.

Dear Ms. Liko,

I would first like to say thank you for giving me an amazing opportunity to be a part
of your class. I enjoyed listening to all the presentations today. Howard pointed
out that I had my back to the presenter. I am sorry about that but I have a hard time
processing overwhelming visual input for long periods of time. I will try to work
on it.

I haven’t decided on my topic for the assignment however I have a few ideas. I would
also like to thank you for talking directly to me. A lot of people stop talking to
me or start talking to Howard
because I don’t look directly at people, but I can promise you that I’m listening.

I’ll e-mail you soon about my assignment.

Your proud and excited student,
Carly

I needn’t have worried about Carly rising to the challenge of school. Carly was motivated
by the intellectual stimulation and by the opportunity to be around typical teenagers.
We could feel her enthusiasm despite her narrow range of emotion she demonstrated
physically. She was eager to share her experiences with people in her social network
on Facebook and Twitter.

“Working on high school homework. I always wanted to say that,”
she posted one afternoon. I wondered how many of the other kids at Western felt as
enthusiastic about schoolwork. Carly had always been a hard worker. Even the simplest
tasks took her months of practice to master. Now, spread out at the dining room table
with articles and textbook chapters to read, she was finally working on what she wanted.
And while it still took her weeks to type out what some students could do overnight,
her enthusiasm never waned.

Despite the energy required to produce relatively terse output, Carly devoured her
assignments with gusto. It was a chance to demonstrate to the world that despite appearing
disabled, she had plenty to say. As the class turned to Freud and the psychology of
dreams, Carly noted on her Facebook page,
“Is it just me, or does anyone else think Freud was a pervert? Lol.”

Every afternoon that she wasn’t working with her occupational therapist or going swimming,
Carly worked on her first major high school assignment. She had not let on how she
planned to tackle it, proudly feeling the need to prove that she was capable of producing
work without anyone’s help.

“Freud was obsessed with dreams and their meaning,”
she typed out for her teacher.
“But if he was alive today I think he would be fascinated by the bond and relationships
between a nanny and the children she cares for. This song is written for a nanny to
sing to the children she cares for. It’s a good thing Freud wasn’t around to psychoanalyze
my song,”
she concluded before typing out the words to her lullaby.

I was a little perplexed by the topic, as Carly had had two nannies in her lifetime,
neither of whom was a theme in her previous conversations or writings. “Okay,” I said
to Carly, “will you show me what you’ve written?”

Wishy Dishy
Wishy dishy I’ll fold your clothes,
and then I’ll tickle your little toes.

Wishy dishy I’ll make your food.
That should put you in an amazing mood.