Why Do They Make the Disabled Kids Pick Up the Trash?

I am tired of all this arguing. Why do they make the developmentally disabled kids pick up trash in high school? This has got to stop. My daughter Georgia is a Senior at Cleveland and she was upset when she came home today. She told me about standing outside on the front steps with a group of students waiting for the field trip to start and there were three kids, all with noticeable cognitive impairments, picking up the trash. They were walking around with those little plastic claw things. She felt terrible and was crying about it when we spoke. It made her sad. "Why can't they do something else productive during the day, like taking an art class? Watching a movie would be better than this."

Okay here is the rhetoric: It is job skills training, they "love" it and feel proud to be making the campus beautiful, cleaning up is not a low life thing to do, disabled people have a hard time getting jobs and this could be a real great opportunity for them, they need to get out of the special ed class and get exercise, blah blah blah.

No. Think dignity. Do we want the other 1450 students, some of whom litter the front steps with gum and candy wrappers to be picked up after by non-paid students who are the most vulnerable group on campus? I want the non-disabled students to get to know these "special ed" kids in a more meaningful way. For most of the student body, this is the only chance they will get to know any challenged/retarded/disabled kids in campus.

My daughter wonders why all these years in high school she has never seen any of her typically-abled peers volunteer in the special ed classrooms or hang out and talk to the kids in the Special Ed class. You know - integration!?

The year before Forrest was to enter Arcata high school we did a campus visit. You could imagine my surprise when a mass of students, dressed in orange denim jumpsuits appeared out of the "Life Skills" class after lunch. They were carrying those plastic claw things. This was their "job skills" class and part of their special education plan. The same plan that they wanted to sign Forrest up for. The campus was thankfully full of fresh litter from the lunch period that just ended. Since the school did not place trash cans around the lawn and parking lots, this made for lots of litter pick up opportunity. The teacher and vice-principal stood around watching and beaming at the cleverness of it all.

Well, it stopped before the of that school year. I made them stop.I tried to be nice about it. Heck, I even save them from a costly discrimination law suit in which Forrest and I would have won. After that, the principal informed me that his staff was no longer allowed to speak to me without a lawyer present.

Instead of picking up trash after lunch, Forrest did many things throughout the years. He got job training at a Hospital, then took a weight lifting class, an art class, he even tried metal shop one semester.

When Forrest started his Freshman year,the janitors simply started putting out a dozen or so trash cans around the lunch area, and the kids in detention continued picking up the remaining litter.