An Education and Bureaucratic Tragedy

by Lloyd B. Abrams

In the 1970s, I was the coordinator of a four-class unit of “educable mentally retarded” students in a public high school in Brooklyn. We were blissfully unhampered by stifling regulations involving signed parental permission slips and annoying administrative authorizations when we worked with our students. In other words, we were pretty much on our own.

One of our main goals was to teach our students how to travel by public transportation. Our mantra was: If you don’t know how to travel, you can’t get anywhere … especially to a job.

We took trips to a variety of employment sites throughout the city – from Windows on the World atop the World Trade Center, to a bottling plant in College Point, Queens – and many other places in between.

We studied display-sized subway and bus maps procured from the Transit Authority. We made sure that all of our students knew their stops and transfer points. On trip day, three of us would arrive at the site by ourselves to meet the students who’d traveled on their own. A fourth teacher would accompany the hesitant few who still needed a chaperone to travel from school and back. Nobody ever got lost.

After our site visit, we’d dismiss our students, and except for the teacher who’d accompanied her crew, our students were free to explore the city and we were also on our own – to shop, to go to the movies, to visit museums, or just have several precious hours to ourselves.

Then one day in January, we were alerted that Patrick J, a quiet and reserved student who wore coke-bottle glasses, but who was one of our higher-functioning 12th graders, had disappeared from his home in Brooklyn. Several days later, he turned up in Texas. Patrick had evidently gone to visit his brother who was stationed on an air force base. He had taken a bus and a subway to Port Authority, then bought a ticket with his Christmas money and boarded a Greyhound bus.

When questioned, Patrick said that he had figured out how to get to Texas from being in our classes. We were so proud of him. He had, indeed, learned how to travel.

On the very last class day, just days before Patrick was about to graduate, a psychologist from the Board of Ed showed up quite unexpectedly to test him. Patrick, like many of our students, had not been retested for a long time – many years more than the required triennial review. That kind of systemic ignoring of regulations was an ongoing money-saving dereliction of educational responsibility and accountability.

So one day too early, and many years too late, Patrick tested out of our special ed program. His functioning level had been adjudged to be too high. Not mentioned in the report was that his near blindness had had a lot to do with his depressed intellectual functioning.

Most certainly, his development had been “delayed,” as the new parlance would have put it. But in retrospect, there had been few appropriate classroom placements available for Patrick other than the CRMD model – i.e., classes for Children with Retarded Mental Development. The myriad of special education designations and categories, the burgeoning of related services and support personnel, and the additional funding for all of the necessary changes were still far in the future.

        But …

        To have such poor, possibly non-corrected or non-correctable eyesight …

        To languish so nobly alongside students who occasionally erupted into fights …

        To have likely been in the wrong classroom situation to begin with …

        To have waited so long before being retested, on his last day in school, no less …

        And then to no longer qualify for related services, including job training and placement assistance …

        That was all such a tragedy.

Rev 22 / February 23, 2023

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February 23, 2023 … Copyright © 2023, Lloyd B. Abrams