Different? You Don't Have Our Vote

Last May, then 5-year-old Alex Barton was voted out of his Florida kindergarten class by his classmates. His teacher, Wendy Portillo, first let the students say what they did not like about Alex after which whether or not he could stay in the classroom was put to a "Survivor-style" vote. The incident sparked national, and international, attention and Portillo was suspended for a year without pay. The January 29th TCPalm reports that, next Monday, Portillo will appeal her suspension at Fort Pierce City Hall:

Alex’s mother, Melissa Barton, said she planned to attend the hearing.

“(Portillo) should not be allowed to work with kids,” Barton said.

Barton has said she thought Portillo should be fired for what happened.

“She’s not the victim here, Alex is,” she said. “This is because of what she did to him. I trusted her to teach him and not abuse him.”

I can't help but agree with Melissa Barton and not only because I'm also the parent of a child on the autism spectrum and a teacher myself. It's one thing to address the individual issues of individual students, but having the rest of the class vote on, in essence, excluding one of their classmates is inexcusable for any teacher.

Too often, students on the autism spectrum---individuals on the autism spectrum---have been excluded and even isolated simply because they're "different."

AM 900 radio (Hamilton, Ontario) recently reported that the Salvation Army is planning to open a $2.2 million center for autistic adults in Hamilton next year, with construction to begin in the spring. Not much more is specified about what sort of facility this new center will be (residential? only for use in the day?) but it's good that what's being talked about are the needs of adults on the spectrum. Indeed,

Major Byron Jacobs notes that services for adults with autism are currently limited or non-existent, leaving them isolated from the community.

And that isolation, adrift and unmoored from the community one lives in---that's the fear behind the fear of having a child who's different, of being different. It's the fear that leads people to yearn to "fit in" and be "normal." As a parent, it can be painful to see your child excluded, or mocked, or bullied, just because he is who he is. Why not, then, seek to make a child as "undifferent" as possible, so he or she won't stand out, can fit in?

I've also been "different." I'm third-generation Chinese-American and while I grew up in a place that's more "diverse" than most---the Bay Area in Northern California---history, in the form of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1180-1943) and of the camps where the Japanese, including Japanese-Americans, were interned, was ever-present. In the 1940s, Yeh Yeh, my grandfather---his American name was Charlie Chew---bought a store from a Japanese man who needed to sell it quickly, as he'd been sent to the camps. That store, Tai Wah, was what enabled Yeh Yeh to send his five children to college and to live, indeed, the immigrant dream, as my dad likes to tell me.

"But what happened to the man who sold Yeh Yeh the store?" I once asked my dad.

After a pause, he said, "We don't know." And then, after another pause, my dad said something about how the fear had never left his family or him if what if the same thing happened to the Chinese as happened to the Japanese?

If we were marked out and sent away, isolated from the community, just because we looked---acted---were different?

Just as Alex Barton was.

Photo by wjklos.