Developmental Diversity Awareness Month

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 ushered a paradigm shift that is slowly gaining in how we perceive and deal with developmental disability, or, “differability”, a new term I just coined. March each year in the CNMI focuses on developmental disability, with particular emphasis on traumatic head injuries and school counselors this year.

ADA specifically points out, inter alia, that people with disabilities are severely disadvantaged socially, vocationally, economically, and educationally; they are a discrete minority who faces purposeful limitations and restrictions, unequally treated, powerless to constructively participate in society; that it is ADA’s goal to assure equality of opportunity, full participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency for such individuals.

We will pardon the archaic use of the word “disability” to characterize the natural and sometimes accident-prone human journey. Indeed, disability is a measurement term that pits a certain condition to an imagined standard or norm. It reflects a previous understanding of life viewed as static substance rather than as a unique creature in an individual journey through the process of evolution. Thus, like toys in a factory line, people from womb-to-tomb are adjudged on whether they fit the standard mode, otherwise, they are shifted out in quality control and set aside for repair. Life is viewed as a problem to be fixed, rather than a condition to be celebrated.

I asked our Child Study Team to look at a young boy who had difficulty focusing, to put it mildly, on his academic work, and had exhibited mood swings that go from angelic to terror-prolific. The intent was to find ways to engage Juan in the learning process based on his unique learning portals. Current educational theory proposes an image of multiple intelligences of everyone, with varying degrees of intensity depending on primary or developed modalities, thus, no educational system promotes homogeneity in academic results or uniformity in pedagogical approaches. The days of one-size-fits-all are long gone, i.e., as far as the rhetoric goes. Unfortunately, the practices and the processes on the ground are fraught with old solidly crusted prejudices.

Juan refused to deliver the notice to his parents that the counselor prepared requesting for their presence in the initial team meeting. “You are going to get me into Special Education, aren’t you?” was his blunt accusatory query.

Might as well call someone a “homo”, the favored putdown among 12-year old boys, when suggesting that one might be enrolled in special education. When I explained that we were just going to check his hearing and his sight, his physical coordination and balance, he immediately identified with his buddy Pedro’s Child Study assessments. “Just like Pedro’s?” he blurted. “Yes, just like Pedro,” I answered.

Along with the inaccurate image that “disability” projects of physical, social and psychological inadequacies, “special education” is perceived as the warehouse of defective merchandize, differing in various schools only in the state of their organization, the orderliness of their operation, the currency of their inventory, and the ease of access to their database. Compliance to top-down regulatory-dictated procedures allegedly from fund sources is the rule of operations. Individualized educational programs (IEPs) are forms that are filled up, which may or may not have any relationship, intentional or accidental, to actual teaching interventions.

Then we have our ill-equipped teachers on multiple intelligences and the learning postals outside the standardized assessment coral. Employed in the same manner as the imported labor in bonded servitude practiced widely in the private and public sectors, teachers become employees on a fortnightly payroll rather than partners in an educational enterprise. When arbitrary policies are adopted on “inadequate information” and stubbornly adhered to because to do otherwise, or worst, to accept that one might have hastily adopted an ill-considered decision, would “make us look foolish,” then one begins to understand the capricious and arbitrary conduct practiced at high places.

In a recent BoE meeting when the celebrated GTC dilapidated building roulette and SVES kindergarten building funds shuffle was formally served after it was cooked elsewhere, Tanya King was kind enough to remind the administrators that the next time decisions of this nature was made, that effort must be made to involve all the stockholders in the decision-making process. It appeared that SVES was not consulted on the decision, let alone privy to the fund shift.

This essay does not try to locate inefficiency nor allocate blame. The ethos of creation vs. evolution that raged more than a century ago is still fundamentally with us in that we refuse to see individuals as unique, unrepeatable gifts of humanity whose value is inherent in their being and becoming rather than whether they measure up to an idealized picture of what they ought to be in a paradise somewhere before ‘the fall,’or what they should be in restoration in a never-neverland elsewhere. Our developmental diversity needs to be celebrated, whether that range be labeled autism, down syndrome, cerebral palsy, etc., and to which, at least, in the tradition I am familiar with, it is that to which we unequivocally and without hestitation, declare: L’achaim! Amen! Anshallah! Namaste!

As articulated by the one who has since operationalized the audacity of hope, in his first address to the joint session of the US Congress on the nation’s current economic crisis: “… The answers to our problems don’t lie beyond our reach. They exist in our laboratories and our universities, in our fields and our factories, in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth. Those qualities that have made America the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history we still possess in ample measure. What is required now we … take responsibility for our future once more.”

The future lies in our hands. The differability of the population is best handled by heads conjoined together in cooperation and collaboration, of inclusion and consultation, rather than relying on the expertise of those who can read the etches in our palms or divine the alignment of the stars.

Beyond the monthly focus, developmental disability needs to be a yearlong preoccupation, and let IEPs as a teaching guide be a tool for every student so that reality be more accurately named—developmental diversity of the differently-able will henceforth be the operating mode of the human journey, and that equality of opportunity, full participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency be universally accessible to all.