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Growing up in Boston as a kid, we had a variety of television shows directed at children that included a number of different adult types from a rather conservatively dressed Big Brother Bob Emery who had us drink a glass of milk to the U.S. President at the time, Eisenhower, everyday at noon as Hail to the Chief played, to the craziness of Bozo the clown who turned out to be the classy gentleman who introduced classy movies like Casablanca and Citizen Kane dressed in a tux and sitting in a big chair in a library on movie night. Among them was Rex Trailer, a nattily dressed cowboy type who may or may not have been sheriff, but he was big in town.

There were always guest appearances on all the shows, sometimes a national celebrity and sometimes just a local one. Someone wanting to get a message out, especially to children, showed up occasionally as did Richard Cardinal Cushing the Archbishop of Boston who was extremely entertaining in himself.

He was on the show one morning sitting in his black, street robes, not all the fancy capes and headgear, surrounded by a large group of kids, not all of them well behaved but all familiar from certain characteristics. He was kind and gentle with the kids on set, and, rather than referring to them in the negative term like “handicapped”, he declared they were special in the eyes of God, exceptional if you will, and he promoted and successfully had the city of Boston, anyway, refer to those with the limitations these kids faced as “Exceptional Children”. Even the word change had an effect. We had Exceptional Children, not handicapped ones.

But the complication was yet to come.

In post-World War II America there was a lot of growing up to do. The world was nothing like it had been for our parents and grandparents and, if things needed to change, this was the time to do it as the country, after fighting fascism, was seeking its identity in a forward moving 20th century leaving the past and what of it had led up to the war behind.

An uneven exercise at best.

Most people were familiar with certain handicaps in those days because they were familiar and easily identified, having been part of life throughout history and in the life of even the smallest village. We were all aware of what was in those days, deaf, dumb, blind, and retarded and, even though treating them correctly was a goal, the theories upon which the approaches had been based had begun with faulty assumptions and beliefs that had to be dispelled.

Lack of sight and hearing was not a sign of intellectual weakness and retardation was not a sign of a total lack of any. And none were the punishment for the sins of the father. We had to learn to abandon historical terms as we saw how demeaning they were as we learned more and recognized something had to be done beyond putting mentally handicapped children in laundry bags all day so they would get exercise and entertainment while attempting to get out. Exposing this practice was what made Gerry Rivers Geraldo Rivera.

Actual Special Education classes based on study and research only tentatively began in New York in 1954 and it was only in the 1970s because of work in New Bedford conducted by graduate students from various disciplines, among them Hillary Rodham, we have Massachusetts State Law 766 that was meant to improve the education of kids with Special Needs.

This was initially accepted as a good idea by older people in education and society in general when they thought they would just have to come up with ways to entertain the deaf, dumb, blind, crippled, halt, lame, and retarded, the obvious ones.

What threw them was that with careful study even these kids had overlying problems that needed to be addressed and their “handicap” was only one of many and could be the least negative of all of them. We also found these limitations came in degrees with even those labeled “blind” having levels of sight.

Not all the kids in the categories were the same as the other kids in that category and needed to be educated according to those differences.

Those of us in the early days of Special Education with degrees and training often found ourselves in battles with administrators who thought that if Special Education students had the modifications that would get them closer to learning what their Regular Ed peers had an easier time with, they would be getting something extra that other students were denied. If you requested the purchase of a piece of equipment that might address a number of the SpEd Students’ needs, it was routinely initially rejected as other classes would not have it, so it was special, and no one, even those labeled with the word “Special” should  get special treatment.

They ignored that no other class needed that equipment because they could learn without it.

I had to fight for a sheltered workshop in my room that allowed my students to do piecework for a local findings company for an hour after lunch each day provided they had done all their pre-lunch class work, and would learn self- discipline and finance as the more piecework they did the more money they made and not doing morning classwork meant lost money. When it was finally allowed, the students opened bank accounts, learned how to balance a checkbook, how to budget, and how to spend money wisely.

These were the kids who, in the old days, were expected to hold cups on streets.

The fight to get permission to start the program was delayed by the old guard not understanding this approach nor why these kids would benefit from it greatly, and on their contention that it was unfair that my SpEd kids could make money at school while the Regular Ed kids couldn’t, which ignored the reality of the time, that Regular Ed kids could get after school jobs while my kids, for the most part, couldn’t.

Beyond their mental and physical limitations to whatever degree, these kids were denied educational opportunities on false pretenses. Getting an audio book for a blind kid did not give him an advantage over a sighted student. It was an attempt to level the field so these kids could get decent jobs with decent wages and not spend their lives caning chairs.

What  delayed the improvement in education for Special Needs kids was not the efforts of those working with the students but those in charge of the school districts threatened by losing control over a system that was once so simple but now is having complications introduced that threatened their reputations in their own mind. 

Why did a first year Special Ed teacher come up with an educational program for which the local paper praised him while the experienced Doctor in charge of innovative programs hadn’t? Rather than see it was based on different training and experience and was not in any way related to either of them but, rather, student education, administrators saw it as bringing up questions of their competence which they did their best to keep from happening. The result of this was that when the program was shown to be successful, instead of being able to share credit, a standard thing teachers allow to get permission to teach, their obstruction was seen as the acts of uninformed people, making themselves what they feared people would think, behind the times.

Fresh off the graduation stage, I entered the field of Special Ed with my masters and some experience and was assigned a converted lavatory at the dead end of an unused third floor corridor with no means of escape in the event of a fire that was justified by the claim that unless the windows were bolted shut, the Special Ed kids might throw books out the windows all the time.

One day I happened to look out the window when moving among the students to help with their assignment and saw the whole student body gathered on the front lawn of the school. Thinking they had forgotten to tell me about some student activity or chose not to tell me in order to keep the kids in the attic, I yelled the three floors down asking what was happening. That is how we found the sound of the fire alarm cannot be heard from the corridor where my classroom was placed. I subsequently brought a large and thick board to stand by the window in case, if there were a future fire and we were left behind again, we could crawl from the classroom window to the roof of the adjoining wing in case the huge metal fire door closed again as it had with the first alarm and could not be open from our handleless side.

I was also assigned students who were labeled “Emotionally Disturbed” having me teach a class basically populated by students with actual needs and those who, while in the old days could be expelled for being jerks, now had to be kept in school putting the burden on schools as how to handle that and so, along with my Autistic student, back in the day when Autism was not getting attention, I had students whose only evidence of any emotional disturbance was the number of arrests they had for breaking into people’s homes and their anti-social behavior encouraged by bad parents. It did not take long for these students to discover the fun one can have setting off the actual Special Needs kids by doing what would most likely set them off. 

Eventually there were two groups in my class, the ones who by law should be there and those who were there only to keep them away from the general population and make administrators’ lives easier since they could not be expelled.

Autism was a relatively unknown condition even among the trained, but I had had a professor in graduate school who, being involved with the 1954 birth of Special Ed, told us about the less common children we would be dealing with and Autistic ones would be among them. The student in my room was considered “retarded” and was being treated accordingly until I changed some things. When it came to the sheltered workshop, along with continuing to throw himself into classwork, he absolutely loved the piecework as you moved at your own pace, could be lost in your own thoughts and world, and it was repetitive and soothing. Although the “non-SpEd kids” had found ways to set the kid off and had to be constantly prevented from doing so, during the first week of work their taunts were like those of the crew of the Pequot attempting to rile QeeQueg when contemplating his death while this kid, seemingly in a trance quietly worked while humming Big Band Era songs to himself as he loved them, so when the checks for the first week’s work came in, at a penny a piece he pulled in over $100 dollars and became the target of competition for the highest paycheck which could only occur if all the students, even the faux-SpEd ones, did their classwork first. They won on two levels, education and income because of the Autistic kid who found he enjoyed always getting the highest pay check and continued to do so until graduation. 

Times changed and now when we consider children with special need, the “Exceptional Children” we go beyond the obvious and traditionally recognized difficulties and, although tough in the beginning, recognize that Autism also exists as do other conditions that students with limitations must deal with, and we can see the growth simply by driving by a school to see the ramp that is part of the building and not a collection of boards a Special Ed teachers had near the playground door so they could get the kid in the wheelchair back inside.

While in the early days some Special Ed kids behaved in ways that gave a bad impression of these kids to authority figures like the time the school officer got angry with my autistic kid because he just sat and looked at the officer silently with a Mona Lisa smile that had him dragged to the office to answer of his lack of cooperation when being questioned.

Special Ed has gone from the unused room by the boiler, to a mainstream part of education and I will bet “dollars to Donuts” there are very few people in 2024 who would find fault with the education of these children preferring the old comfortable days when they actually were there but not seen.

A closet may be one thing and referred to as such and perhaps decorated to make it less of just a door in the room that goes nowhere. It’s truth is only shown when you open the one door and see what actually is behind it.

Special Ed has grown through the years and I am sure most people would not look kindly at someone who would prefer to keep the old days alive and treat people now as they were treated then.

I believe this would bother a lot of people.

Society has grown and we no longer put the mentally challenged in laundry bags.

From the mid-seventies until now, I have watched people accept more and more ideations of the “Exceptional Child”, and how society, originally reluctant, has grown for the sake of those who need that growth, themselves and others.

And, when 766 finally took root after years of learning and adapting, it was actually a good thing and just part of our world.

I know for a fact, having been there, that certain conditions now seen as needing attention or educational modifications had originally been viewed as excuses that kids and parents used to get the kid out of work or trouble. At the birth of ADHD it was seen as an attempt to avoid being accused of bad behavior. The kid in class who annoyed you because he seemed always distracted and not hanging on your every word might have a hearing impediment best addressed through means other than pumping up your volume or writing him off as lazy.

On the other end of the spectrum, how many gifted kids were treated according to their behavior that was based on intellectual boredom and not a lack of intelligence or behavioral control

Years ago I taught in a town that had a factory that made little puffball creatures with adhesive feet you attached to a gift instead of a bow. There was an assembly line where the flat foot pad passed in front of someone who glued a fuzzy ball on it before it went past the left googly eye applicator on to the right googly eye applicator moving onto the person who glued the random item on, a scarf, a hat, a cane, glasses, and, when it reached the end of the assembly line drop into a box that would be moved when full. They liked to employ the mentally handicapped as they could handle the mindless monotony of putting the googly eye at the tip of your finger onto a puffy ball that is passing by forty hours a week. My students would be heading that way if society did not become more informed and adjust accordingly about the brain and all connected to it. It was the school’s annual “there but for the grace of God go I” pilgrimage, the scared straight moment when kids saw their future choice, start learning now or end up in the weebles factory. As opportunities grew for the Special Needs kids they began to recognize the choice they too needed to make. Their future could be based on their choices, and they had them too.

In the last 47 years, 38 of them teaching before retirement, I saw the changes in school and society as even businesses made accommodations to allow people with disabilities to come inside and not be relegated to watching everyone inside from the sidewalk.

Growth has proven to be a good thing.

I see a parallel in the area of Gender.

Just Like we had been accustomed to obvious limitations and the challenges faced by some of us who were blind, deaf, physically impaired and had to accept there was more to it than met the eye, and as we learned we grew as we accepted new things even if our original reactions may have bordered on rejecting certain handicaps because they initially sounded phony to us or made us uneasy. 

After all those years and as a result of them unless you are the coldest of people with the stoniest of hearts, the only time what used to bother you even just visually, the only time the handicap bother most of us is when we can’t find a parking place and in the search keep passing the empty handicap spot.

When it comes to gender, we are basically still in the 1970s. We were comfortable in there being men and women even if some of them were Gay or Lesbian which took a little work to accept as we had them in closets and under control. Then they made it Gay men, Straight men, Lesbians and Straight women tipping things a bit. Then we had to handle variations on the original F/M model and Bisexuality and Transgender, the former being more acceptable although they both remove some comfort that existed with the established binary which has been challenged by those who, as the Gays did, love someone without it having to be okay with others and be required to follow what keeps them comfortable. 

It is not like recognizing something new negates all the old, just the mistaken parts of it, but rather it is adding something correct while shelving that which seemed the way it just was until it was tested or new information was learned.

The reaction should be the same as when you finally check to see what that odd valve is in the cellar. It was always there. You looked at it each time you walked by but never really bothered with it,  until that moment when you discover what had always been there but you knew nothing about, even though at any time you could have learned about it. It did not suddenly appear and will most likely not reproduce or subsume you into being a part of it. It will continue to exist as it was unless you decide to harm it in any way intentionally or by accident.

You can leave it as is without it having any more influence on your life than what someone five towns away is doing at that very moment

There is a danger in every comparison. To avoid foolishness, this is about the growth of the always existing unknown to the common place that involved acceptance and reluctance, a swiftness in learning more, and a reluctance to let new, unknown things become known and part of your world.

The young might not appreciate the reference, but, if you were around and in school or teaching in the 1970s, when it comes to Special Ed, compare the room by the boiler, the converted bathrooms (I had one and another time a closet), the spare materials the teacher was given or scrounged up, the times “special Class’ could not go on certain field trips and no one wanted them in extra curricular activities you see the huge difference between then and now.

The 2020s and a few years prior are far away from the attitudes of the old days. During those times society slowly caught on and addressed the needs of these students, put aside the bigotry that had been so comfortable and communal, learned what it was that kid has, got accustomed to the modifications to level the field, and now at a corner of the sidewalk wonder why there is a curb with no ramp.

The same with gender variants. The Heterosexuals feel put upon because of all these new gender things popping up and, just as they had assumed children with special needs came into existence in great numbers because we created the Special Education class in schools, the same is happening with gender because we are recognizing what is there for what it is, not what we assumed it was from our point of view. 

Ignore reality so it can go away.

I once stood in front of a large group of people while explaining the advocacy within the school district and as I am my age and the vocabulary was what it was then, my constantly referring to “Gay students” had someone in the audience question why I was only advocating of Gay and Lesbian students and not him. At that point, with 20 years of fighting for Gay rights in my background, when in response to my inquiry as to who he was he uttered a word I was hearing for the first time either because I could hear it specifically being said, or in the past other things may have pushed it aside, “Intersexed”, after a long day at school and now this community meeting my response was a genuine, “What the hell is that?”

The important point was I could have brushed him off, stuck unswervingly to the Gay/Lesbian paradigm as if he were dismissible and move to the next question, or ask him again in a less reactive way to define this new term for me with me accepting that it may not be my thing but it is as essential to him as my being Gay is to me.

I understand the initial surprised response of most people when someone mentions a new gender variant. I responded as I did and I was someone who should have known or there was enough evidence to show I should have known. I went on to read up more on it and did the same when another variant was mentioned, accepting that it might not be my thing but I need to respect them.

“What the hell is that?” is a normal response, even the icky feeling if what is defined is nowhere near your wheelhouse. What should also be normal is to look further into something new and not settle on the initial response. And if it is such a part of society that you do not notice, don’t go looking. The bad ones in any group will eventually become visible; the vast majority just go about life.

Although the subject may not be the same, the initial reluctance and rejection involving Special Ed in the 1970s as compared to now is a world of difference with most of it taken for granted as part of society. We do notice if a building is handicapped accessible even if it is just a passing thought, one among thousands. But we notice.

As gender is more seriously studied there will be more variations discovered and humanity opens wider like a blooming flower. Just like what happened to society when it came to Special Ed which did not bankrupt school districts as those who were reluctant to grow claimed in order to first prevent and then limit it. 

With the exception of the perpetual neanderthals, I feel in time humanity will find itself further educated, whether or not someone else’s thing, and will be as embarrassed by how foolish their reluctance was toward Gender as those with the archaic attitudes toward Special Ed are now about their old attitudes.

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