Sunday, May 20, 2012

This Is Way Too cool

From the LVRJ:   
Prom never entered his mind, not even when he rolled to the ledge and saw rose petals strewn over the school's wheelchair ramp, down to her. Ben Bunker instinctively turned the other way.
At the direction of a friend, though, he moved past the petals to a thin, graceful blonde standing at the bottom, surrounded by a ring of roses. All the colors Meagan Baker could find. She held a bouquet of other assorted flowers, the names of which she doesn't know, except for the sunflower.
She knelt and "he got bright red," Meagan recalls in her detailed recounting of asking Ben to prom.
She handed him a piece of paper. She'd scribbled her phone number and a question mark, and told him to call her later. No pressure to answer now.
Before then, they'd never spoken.
"He didn't call or text all night. Oh, great," Meagan remembers thinking, and laughed at the risk she'd taken in the grand gesture. "I wanted to make it big. Everybody makes it big."
Meagan, a senior at the 2,500-student Foothill High School in Henderson, had noticed others wouldn't hold the door for Ben, who mostly gets around in a wheelchair because of a spinal-cord tumor. But she would, which Ben noticed.
Meagan wasn't the only Foothill senior reaching out to someone they barely knew, inviting someone likely to miss Senior Prom. She and other students had approached school staff a few weeks ago, saying they wanted to ask all special needs seniors to the May 12 event in one-on-one dates.
http://www.lvrj.com/news/football-high-school-seniors-ask-special-needs-classmates-for-prom-dates-152194255.html
The prom invitations for special education seniors came via a group serenade to the tune of Hootie and the Blowfish's "Only Wanna Be With You." Two senior girls rewrote the words for the surprise:
You and me,
We come from different worlds
We will dance, we will sing,
We just want to go with you,
And feel the joy you bring.
The students then individually asked their prospective dates to the prom. Some invitees didn't understand. "I have things to do that night," one said.
Most, however, like Cassidy Cooper, said yes.
CCSD has taken a lot of hits from the community because low graduation rates, high drop out rates, wasteful spending and problems with the teacher's union.  However, CCSD does do 1 thing pretty good and that is special education.  I am a special education teacher in CCSD, so I may appear to be somewhat biased, but then I have seen other special education classes in other districts and we do pretty good compared to other districts.
Anyways, special education students are treated very well in our district by other students.  At the school I teach at, you can have the hardest to the core gang banger, but they will go out of their way to open their door for our kids and even say hi to the kids in the hallway.  In regular education classes, the regular education students go out to their way to help with our severely disabled students.
So, I am proud that my daughter will be attending Foothill as a 9th grader next school year and I hope these seniors actions will rub off to kids following in their footsteps.  Nice job to the senior class of 2012 at Foothill H.S. in Henderson, NV.

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