Hey thanks. I have felt kind of guilty about it ever since. I don’t want her to miss out but just thinking about “Maybe this environment isn’t right for you” seems…wrong somehow. I dunno. She’s 10, I am supposed to be the adult.
But you’re not supposed to be SuperWoman.
It’s one thing for the parents to sign the kid up for something that’s a small stretch for the kid. Growing up is all about growing and stretching and mild discomfort doing so. It’s quite another thing for clueless parents to sign the kid up for something that’s a no-hoper for them. Whether the parents did that through ignorance of their child, ignorance of the program, or abject neglect.
Your range of adjustment for the poor unfortunate kid is only so large. There just wasn’t (much) overlap between the most she could do and the least you could demand of her while still keeping the other kids going.
Her parents painted her into a corner you couldn’t quite save her from. No dishonor in that, no matter how heart-rending the poor kid’s legitimate crying in physical and emotional pain & frustration.
My daughter’s high school volleyball coach would have loved to make his sport no-cut. He often had over 60 girls trying out and would have to pare it down to three rosters - freshman, JV and varsity, maybe 40-45 players total.
Basically, it would have meant starting an afterschool volleyball club for those other 20-25 girls to meet a couple days a week, preferably led by someone who knew how to roll out a ball and do a little teaching of basic volleyball skills. Clubs could even play other club’s schools on the cheap - parents provide rides, call your own lines and club advisors serve as refs.
It was a good idea, but the lack of coaching-time and court space were the key reasons why it never happened.
None of this would have taken away from the varsity - they still would have been the fully competitive wanna-win group that they were, the folks who wanted to see great ball being played could still have made their matches. But it would have been nice to have an opportunity for some of the rest of the girls who came out to have some fun with the sport as well, and who knows - maybe they would have made the competitive squads themselves in a year or so.
As the parent of a special needs kid I have to say I would appreciate the honesty. I don’t always know what an activity’s going to entail or how well my son will take to it. He’s young yet, but our philosophy is “try it and see how he does.” I recently took him to a book reading and nature walk at the local nature center because that was such a big part of my youth. It wasn’t exactly a spectacular failure but he seemed indifferent to the whole thing, and got very little out of it. Whereas for swimming I took a WAG that he would take to it well, and he loves it. But the manager there evaluated him and said he was more appropriate for one on one lessons than group classes. And I totally respect that.
I’m saying I would want the director of such an activity to be honest about my son’s limits. Because I can’t always see them. I’m just trying things to see what works because I never want to tell my kid, “You can’t do that because you have a disability.” I want instead to say, “Maybe you can do that. Let’s find out.” I often find he exceeds my expectations in terms of what he can handle.
But you gave this kid a try, and I think that’s all any parent can reasonably ask for.
I think this is a point worth making, it’s worth considering whether there’s any potential disrespect or exploitation of the person being included. But with a homecoming celebration being a festive and not competitive event, I wouldn’t see a problem with it.
I don’t think it implies that the school doesn’t care about excellence. It does say that they care about inclusion (for the benefit of the less-than-fully-able, and the acculturation of everyone else) more than they do about absolute excellence, but they can still insist that each member of the squad perform to the best of their individual abilities.
You also can’t have some kid who never played baseball before and is a below average athlete batting against someone with a 90 MPH fastball. You can do it, but it’s not competitive. Everyone wants to play a competitive game, at their level. If the levels are too different it’s not fun.
So at some point the very talented kids get to play against and with other players of similar talents. It’s okay for other people to keep playing, just not at the same level or with the same people.
There’s also the issue of cost, how many games are you playing and with what level of support system.
My youngest was mid functioning on the autism spectrum. She did the school choir class for 6 years from 6-11th grade. To be honest, she was kinda distracting almost all the years during performances for friends and family. The last year or so, someone in the audience might not have noticed she wasn’t 100% on the program.
Her choirmates and director were heartbroken when she passed away in January.
If it’s a non-serious competitive situation, inclusion that can be accommodated is a good thing for all. And it’s helpful for kids to learn that not everyone has the same ability and to make room. As a society, we are only as good as how we take care of those that need help. Not a criticism, but China has an up or out Darwinian system that is horrible for late bloomers. YMMV, but how competitive you are at 6 years old shouldn’t close 99% of the doors out there.
Define “excellence”.
The implication seems to me to be that the school cares more about excellence in supporting all their students than it does about excellence in cheering.
It should be evident that the students are trying their best. That doesn’t mean that they are performing at pro-level. It means that it’s evident that they have been working on the routine and have produced the best routine they can. If it looks like they just threw something together at the last minute, that looks sloppy and like they don’t care about trying.
For sports, I think there’s too much emphasis on having HS sports being just below college level. I think that puts excessive pressure on the students to perform at that level and excludes a lot of students from playing the sport. If you’re not at AAA level, you won’t make the team. I think it would be better to take a lot of kids and have them play to the best of their ability. As long as they work hard in the practices, they can stay on the team. Whether they can do the sport at the near-college level shouldn’t matter.
I feel the same way about the performing arts. Some of the high schools around here have near-Broadway levels of productions. That looks good, but it excludes a lot of kids who can’t sing, dance, or act at that level. I think it would be better if they took it down a few dozen notches so all the kids who wanted to perform could be on the stage.
Unfortunately, a lot of parents set the expectation that the students must perform at a near-pro level. They pressure the school to hire coaches and directors who will execute at these top levels. They vote for bonds to create pro quality stadiums and theaters. I think that’s excessive. The kids can achieve excellence no matter what ability they have. It should be more about them achieving their own level of excellence rather than being judged against an external standard.
But to the OP’s point, if the entire squad is the Rancho Carne Toros except for one token special needs kid, what’s the point? That sounds like Liberal participation trophy-ism and virtue signaling to me.
If the team is meant to represent a diverse cross-section of the student body, that’s a different story.
Most such activities have different divisions or leagues to account for varying levels of interest and ability. I don’t think it makes sense nor is it really fair to bring someone onto the team simply because they want it really badly and come from unfortunate circumstances.
It’s offensive to call a special needs kid “token” in this instance. “Tokenism” is when someone is brought into an organization purely for appearance’s sake. In this case, the child is brought into the organization* for the child’s sake. If there were two children with special needs who wanted to join, there’d be two kids on the team.
Again: children’s school activities should be organized for the sake of the children above anybody else.
Someone else brought up cheer teams’ role in raising school pride, and how a well-coordinated team is better at that. I’d suggest that a school whose pride is raised by excluding children with disabilities has nothing to be proud of; and if one’s pride can only be raised through such exclusion, it’s not pride, it’s arrogance.
One of the few hills I will always die on is: participation trophies are Actually Good.
For kids’ activities, talent is a crapshoot. Even restricting ourselves solely to the developmentally normal able-bodied kids, some are going to just excel. They’re bigger and stronger and faster, or they’ve got better hand-eye co-ordination or spatial awareness; they’ve got good pitch and rhythm; they’ve got parents who love [activity] and have been doing it with them since they could walk. Others don’t win those lotteries. But they turn up. They do the thing we always say we really want our kids to learn, which is to work hard and not give up at the first difficulty. They don’t get the pay-off of applause the talented kids get for scoring a goal, or performing a solo. But they don’t quit either. This is praiseworthy and should be recognised and celebrated. Perhaps even more so than being naturally fast.*
I’m a kids’ coach, and if you do that then after a while of volunteering they ask you very nicely but quite firmly if you’d like to get the official coaching qualification. And when you do that you don’t just get practical “this is how to teach this technique” stuff, you get the professional ethos bit too. Which is that your job as a coach is to make sure that every kid:
- Has fun
- Is safe
- Develops to the best of their ability
It is not fun to be left out. Being left out does not develop a person to the best of their ability. Therefore, it is to be avoided. Participation, on the other hand, is fun, and does develop people. Maybe it doesn’t develop their skills at the activity. Maybe it develops their sense of belonging and their belief that despite their differences they are a welcome member of society. That’s OK. @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness is exactly right- this (fun and development and belonging) is why we’re doing these activities in the first place! Excluding kids is a failure to meet our goals.
Sometimes however, because you want everyone to develop to the best of their ability, some kids will be doing stuff or using equipment that others can’t use safely. And sometimes, the skill differential will get so great that participating is not fun and does not develop anything but a sense of frustration. And at that point, you do need to separate people out by ability. But this happens to everybody at some stage. So you have to maximize every chance for participation until that threshold is reached so that everyone has developed to the best of their ability, not been chucked out at the first hurdle.
*At some point, the naturally talented kids get to the point where everyone else is naturally talented too, and that’s when they have to learn for the first time the value of turning up even when you don’t win - very often this is a really hard lesson and not everyone learns it.
This is a really good way to look at it. I was a fan of “levels” in high school. They let me take a math class that was actually interesting. They also let me take a gym class where i wasn’t just left in the dust. I was happy about both of those. But i can see that it’s valuable to give everyone a chance to develop to the point of being qualified for those skilled groups before you start segregating them.
It’s valuable in various ways
- everybody deserves fun
- lessons about shared endeavour, working with others both more and less skilled than you, not excluding people because they’re different etc.
- people develop at different rates - one day something clicks and the team weak link becomes a linchpin and what a good thing it is the whole team gave them time to do that. Or the big shot plateaus, everyone catches up and isn’t good we’ve established norms for treating people who aren’t quite as good as everyone else?
As I mentioned before, I think it’s highly unlikely there are any victims here. Young people these days tend to value inclusivity including students with disabilities. It probably makes them feel good to have this person on their team.
An example which is very close to @Dinsdale’s OP:
End of term show last year. Kids (aged 10-12) have been rehearsing for weeks. Performance skills vary. Some kids are just reciting lines, some perform. Some are loud, some are not. Some make friends with the audience, some are nervous. But it’s all ticking along and about as good as a school show gets.
Then Steve* comes on. Steve has Downs Syndrome. The play grinds to a total halt. He reads the lines from his crib sheet slowly. They are utterly indistinct. The rhythm of the play has completely failed. Even worse, the kids on stage break character and stand around waiting for Steve to get his lines out. Finally he does and is led off the stage (to loud applause, natch) and the kids on stage look at each other, work out what they were meant to be doing and the play grinds back up through the gears.
If I were a drama critic, my review would have to be that Steve fucked it. Just totally ruined the whole performance. The play would have been better without him in it.
But of course he should have been in it. It’s just an end of term play, the whole point of which is to give everyone their little moment in the spotlight; the more talented kids got to sing and dance and cartwheel and everyone got the benefit of seeing Steve beaming with pride because he’d gone up there and joined in. It’s no more tokenistic than choreographing a scene where cartwheel girl gets to cartwheel.
*Not his real name, come on.
My son is 29. In grade school he took a mentally challenged mainstreamed classmate “under his wing”. He taught me that my use of the word “retard” was horrible and so I changed my ways.
In a competitive event, then they couldn’t really do something like this, unless they truly don’t care about winning. The team is going to have their best players out there to have their best shot at winning. If they are winning by a large margin, then they may have the players with less skill come out and play, but only as long as that doesn’t jeopardize their risk of winning. But if it’s just something for fun, then everyone (including the audience) should just enjoy that the kids are doing something that they enjoy.
That made me cry a little.
My husband said that he had always hoped to teach our son to be inclusive of the “weird kid.” Well, turns out our son is the weird kid. I just hope people will be inclusive of him.