June 19, 2010

Poop, Doodie and Other Things at the End

When you work with young children, poop can be a very big deal. When you work with kids who have sensory problems, it is an overwhelming issue that can last until the child is 5 or 6. There are two bathrooms in my little school and they are never busier than between the ages of 4 and 5. Schools do not want children who are not toilet trained, especially poop trained. A 5 year old recently informed me that she would not get out of her diapers until kindergarten, at which time she would be a big girl including her bottom. A few avoid looking in the direction of the bathroom, while others won’t go in there to even get a tissue. We have a dolly sitting on a toy toilet in one room that says, “Oh!Oh! Gotta go!” with a variety of other appropriate phrases. We have The Potty Book for Boys, The Potty Book for Girls, and Everybody Poops, among many others. The toy barn has a pig that poops, one of the favorite animals on the animal farm. One boy especially likes it because it looks real but has no smell. “Real poop smells yuckie!” There is also the matter of what you call it. If you give it the wrong name, different than used at home, the child often won’t respond. The rank order of preference seems to be poop(ie), doodie, and kaka, with one outstanding “defecate”! We had a recent meeting about a child with severe intestinal problems. The father said, “He messed himself, but you don’t want to hear about that.” I assured him that we did and as a result learned important and necessary information about the youngster that would help us help him. Everybody has their thing about poop, including the adults. It is as though if we don’t talk about it, the problem will solve itself. Because it can be such a delicate and embarrassing problem, we use a lot of humor. You know the musical cards now available for various occasions? We have a special collection of them: a fart card, a doodie song card, and a Father’s Day card that sings about the different colors of poopie that daddies have cleaned up over the years.

It is June and the end of the school year. With the economy the way it is, state budgets in crisis, and the Gulf Oil disaster looming large, special education is the last thing on anybody’s mind. So when parents leave an IEP meeting and mutter, “They are all full of shit”, or a teacher tries to recover from the crap dumped on her (him) by her supervisor about what she is to give as her input for next year, the poop metaphor immediately kicks in. A friend of my son is a special education teacher in Massachusetts. He has been teaching in a self-contained class three years and can’t take it any more. He is leaving the profession as are many. Remember the movie classic Caddy Shack? My children, my husband and I would watch it over and over again years ago, waiting for the pool scene. People are jumping into the pool and things are as rowdy as they could get. Suddenly, somebody yells “Doodie”, as a fat black cigar floats across the middle of the pool. People scream and jump out of the pool, water everywhere. Mayhem ensues. My kids squealed in delight, giggling uncontrollably as they waited for the moment to say “Doodie!” in sync with the movie script. There is something so gross and so human about the power of excrement in our lives. One very proper mother tried to work with a school district for years to get proper services for her child. In the end, she simply gave up, saying “They are turds on the ass of the earth.” And then she cried.

As we get older, the terms shift from doodie to shit, from kaka to the place of origin- ass hole. These are largely private words that polite people avoid saying. All of them deal with broken systems and an end product. When you are inside the system, such as disabled children and their families, the sensitivity to let people see the hurt and the harm is such that most simply hold the feelings in. It hurts too much to let them out, to think about it, and to let go and do something about it. I read a lot of special education stuff. Prominent among them now is- RTI Helps Special Needs Students, 504 Plans Benefit Those in Special Education, Helping the Intellectually Challenged Go to College, and of course- Inclusion Shown to Benefit Those with Severe Disabilities. It is all PR, crap, shit, garbage in, garbage out. Literally everything is done not to mention IDEA, the IEP and how it is required to be developed. The absence of any mention of special education in Education Week closes the sphincter. And look at the kinds of programs the publicly funded parent groups provide- Oh! Oh! Gotta Go!

I am trying to find some staff to hire. As a result, and for the first time for me, the current state of special education training is seen. These teachers are bright, committed to children, creative, and many horribly, horribly trained. They are never ready for what awaits them in a real classroom. The graduate programs turning out special educators may be more of the problem than the public schools, though both work hand in hand. The richness and balance of their diet and intellectual intake is missing, leaving them with the equivalent of junk food and constipation in the face of a child or situation they haven’t seen before. The best place to find those kinds of minds and talents is often in parents. So my preference is to find a talented parent of a special needs child, train them, and put them to work. They intuitively know how to read many situations that trained teachers completely miss. But not always. As it is working out, the pairing of the parent with the professional as a teaching team seems to provide the right input that gives children the needed output at the end of the teaching chain.

In the smelly silence about special education, Christopher Dodd, Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Children and Families, recently announced that public hearings are to be scheduled on today’s challenges facing America’s families (Think Caddie Shack just before…Doodie!) Dodd wants to create a national commission on children in order to examine their needs and identify solutions. (Peristalsis starts and I’m getting a stomach ache.) IS HE KIDDING? WE NEED A COMMISSION FOR THIS? We know all we need to know for the time being. Enforce the laws on the books for God’s sake. There are enough studies on this topic to make toilet paper for a long time, and they’ve been put to about that much use. While Dodd talks about this Commission, and Obama and Duncan remain mute about special education, new babies are born, toddlers become kindergartners, and mommies and daddies, grandmas and grandpas do what they have always done- the best they can. But the system of special education? We are at the end. Oh! Oh! Gotta Go!