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What’s It Like To Be The Last Kid Picked in School?
Teachers cause — and can fix this
This morning I saw a heartbreaking message from a father whose 4-year-old had no “best friend” in his preschool class.
Thousands of comments on this tweet attested to the terrible feeling of a child who is ostracized, teased, or simply left behind or left out. This never happened to me. But the summer before my grandfather died, I attended summer school at Clement Junior High, a school I didn’t normally attend, with nearly all kids I didn’t know. I made a few friends in the first week, but then the young summer school teacher in our class did something unexpected: she branded me a behavior problem and I got sent to the “short bus” class.
This was a class filled with kids with cerebral palsy and what they referred to at the time — a common playground insult among ‘normal’ kids — “MRs”. I won’t repeat the outdated phrase but you can guess what that stood for. Kids with developmental delays and other cognitive issues.
It was probably one of the most fun, best summers of my life. I had to push a lot of wheelchairs but I also made a lot of new friends. In this…
