Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 25 of Contemplating Life.

This week we are going to resume talking about my experiences growing up attending a special education school and how I transitioned to attending a regular high school part-time. Some of this story you’ve already heard in bits and pieces in previous episodes as well as in my reading of my award-winning magazine feature titled “The Reunion”. But we’re going to add some detail and context in this episode.

For many kids, the transition from junior high to high school is a difficult one. In eighth grade, you are the “upperclassman” of the junior high. In high school, as a freshman, you are at the bottom of the pecking order. In a very small school like James E. Roberts School for the Handicapped that’s not such a big issue. These are kids you have been going to school with for perhaps nine years. You already know the sophomores and juniors because they were in 7th and 8th when you were in 6th. It’s not like you were moving to a different building and mixing with a bunch of kids you’d never known.

There were somewhere between 25-30 kids in the entire high school program at Roberts. During my freshman year, I was assigned to Mrs. Harriet Bartlett’s homeroom. There was a row of wheelchair desks along the back wall facing the wall. I would sit at that desk whenever I wasn’t in class. There was always a class going on at the front of the room around a large table. When it was time for one of my classes, I would either go to that front table or to the other high school room with Mr. Sam Price.

Mrs. Bartlett taught math, French, and bookkeeping. Mr. Price taught English and social studies as well as sophomore biology which was the only science class available.

Freshman algebra was no challenge to me because it didn’t require any basic arithmetic. As I mentioned in earlier episodes, I can do complex mathematics but simple addition and subtraction is sometimes a challenge. I had no trouble mastering the logic of deriving algebraic equations and I enjoyed graphing functions. I also had no difficulty with English. We didn’t have spelling words anymore. Again you may recall I suck at spelling. I don’t exactly recall what classes I took. I think perhaps the school nurse taught a health class.

I took French but I was never any good at it. I got an “A” for the first six weeks, a “B” for the second six weeks, a “C” for the third six weeks, and straight “Ds” thereafter for two years.

I sang in the choir with Mrs. Atkins who we mentioned extensively in a previous episode. We also had a part-time art teacher who came into the building one or two days a week and I took an art class.

I remember one art project where we cut an abstract shape out of a piece of cardboard and then used it as a stencil and spray-painted Day-Glo colors around it. I couldn’t handle spray cans so the art teacher did it for me. She would twist and turn the shape in different orientations and spray different colors. It looked completely abstract to me. I thought the Day-Glo spray paint gave it a bit of a psychedelic look.

It turns out the teacher had something up her sleeve. She entered my creation, which was actually about 75% hers, in something called the 500 Festival Art Contest. It won a blue ribbon. We took a field trip to where all of the artwork was on display including my ribbon-winning entry. I don’t recall where it was. It might’ve been the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Anyway, my creation was expertly mounted and framed. This was the first I had seen it in such a condition. She had given it the title “Radiant Madonna”. It took me a while staring at it to get the point. When I was making it, I was holding it horizontally in landscape format. She turned it vertically in portrait format and if you looked at it weirdly, it vaguely resembled a mother holding a baby.

Let me make it plain, that was not my artistic intent. I’m not sure Picasso would have seen the outline of a Madonna it was so abstract. But the judges thought it was brilliant. I got the blue ribbon but I didn’t get to keep the artwork. They auctioned it off and the proceeds went to arts programs. I’m not sure what they got for it. All of this was without my permission.

The art room wasn’t much more than a supply closet with a table in the middle. The only other interesting thing that ever happened there was Alan Whitney made out with Cheryl Fayette one time when the art teacher accidentally left the door unlocked on a day we didn’t have class.

I mentioned previously that in order for two teachers to try to teach an entire high school curriculum from freshman through senior years, they had to divide the day into 12 periods of 30 minutes each. A typical high school class period runs 45 minutes and I think in some schools even an hour. Because class periods were just 30 minutes, if you took 5 classes plus lunch that meant you still had 6 periods with nothing to do.

To fill the time, I spent a lot of time reading sci-fi books and even attempted to write my own sci-fi story. I had no plot. No outline. No characters established. No idea where it was going. Somehow I thought you wrote books the same way that you read them. You just started out and the ideas would come to you in order. Some people might do that but it didn’t work for me. I wrote about two pages and then didn’t know what to do. I gave up quickly.

I really don’t remember much more about my freshman year.

When my sophomore schedule came out, all of my classes were before lunch. That meant I was going to spend three straight hours in the afternoon with absolutely nothing to do except try not to get in trouble and ignore the class going on at the front of the room. The biology class was going to be nothing but a textbook course with no lab equipment and no animal dissection.

My mom was furious at the substandard education I was getting and I wasn’t too happy about it either.

She arranged a meeting between her and the principal or vice principal at my neighborhood high school – Northwest High School just a few blocks from my house. The ground floor was wheelchair accessible but there was no elevator or ramp to the second floor. Certain departments were exclusively on the second floor – most notably all social studies and math. Biology and physics were split between both floors but chemistry was exclusively upstairs where they had special lab equipment. English was split between floors. Although the library was on the ground floor, there were 2 steps you had to go down to get to it. I would have liked to have been able to access that. It turned out, I could get everything I needed for term papers and other homework at the local public library.

While I could understand why it was impossible to move the chemistry classes downstairs because the room was specially fitted with chemistry equipment, it would not have caused any problem to move one math and one social studies class downstairs each semester. Mom couldn’t persuade them to do that and so I would not be able to attend Northwest full-time.

They were also concerned about what I would do in the lunchroom and how I would go to the bathroom. Bathroom issues probably deserve an entirely separate podcast episode. We probably could have worked out the bathroom issues as well as getting someone to help me with lunch. I was able to feed myself. I would have just needed someone to carry a tray for me. The school wasn’t convinced I could handle it.

The only compromise we could reach was for me to attend Roberts in the morning and take whatever courses were inaccessible at Northwest. In the afternoon at Northwest, I would take whatever was available on the ground floor. It wouldn’t require any changes at Roberts because all of my classes were already in the morning. I would just skip the ones I would be taking at Northwest.

The next issue was transportation. I could ride the bus as usual from my house to Roberts in the morning. The school district refused to transport me from Roberts to Northwest at midday. So my mom agreed to drive me every day in our van. After morning classes followed by lunch at Roberts, I would go to the bathroom there with the assistance of the janitor who normally helped me. Then mom would drive 7 miles from our house to Roberts, pick me up, and drive 7 miles back to Northwest. The school bus was coming through my neighborhood at the end of the day anyway because it had to bring home my friend Mark Herron who lived right around the corner for me.

So, approximately two weeks into the semester we implemented the plan.

There was a major misunderstanding about the afternoon bus trip at first. The first day I waited a very long time for the bus to pick me up at Northwest and bring me back home. Rather than go to Northwest in the middle of their round as they came through my neighborhood, they finished the entire round and then came back to Northwest and picked me up to bring me home.

We pointed out how ridiculous that was. We explained to them that the trip from Northwest to my house was not out of their way and they could do it in the middle of the route. After that initial hiccup, the bus transportation went okay.

Mom made that trip every day for three years with two exceptions. She had some back trouble one time and needed a few days off. She was also pregnant with my sister Karen during my junior year and needed a few days. The school district agreed that we could use the bus if we would pay the bus driver Mr. Lewis to drive it for the midday trip.

I took French, geometry, trigonometry, and choir in the morning at Roberts and then took Biology with a biology lab followed by English at Northwest.

There were some timing issues to work out. I would arrive at Northwest about halfway through the period before my first class. I had to be somewhere not just roaming the halls so they had me sit in the science department office. Biology class had what they called swing periods. There were two biology classes that occupied three periods of the schedule. One of the classes met fifth and sixth periods. The other class met sixth and seventh periods. That middle period alternated between lab and study hall. The study hall they used was upstairs so on the alternate days when my group didn’t have a lab, I would go back to the science department office.

They always had a volunteer student in the office throughout the day to answer the phone, take messages, and help out any of the science teachers who needed help setting up experiments or cleaning out the storage rooms. The first semester there was a guy named Jim something. We got to be friends but not really close. For my second semester, the other student in the science office was Dennis Adams and we became very good buddies. I will talk much more about him in later episodes.

I had no difficulty adapting to regular, non-special ed, classes. I did so well in biology the first semester that they transferred me to AP Biology for the second semester. That was a mistake on my part. I had tried so hard to impress everyone that I excelled too much. AP Biology was really hard and I was lucky to get a B for the semester. After that, I always was careful to dial it back a bit so I wouldn’t get AP placement again.

Back to the scheduling issues… Once we had the bus running a decent route, I still had about 20 minutes after the last period before the bus would arrive. Either Dennis, one of my other classmates, or a teacher would help me get my coat on. During nice weather, I would wait outside. When it was cold, I would sit just inside the door of the science wing and I could see the bus pull in the parking lot. By the time they got parked and got the wheelchair lift unfolded, I was out there waiting.

There were some afterschool activities such as chess club and AV club that met after school. I tried hanging out with them for 15 or 20 minutes while waiting on the bus and occasionally I would lose track of time and the bus would be waiting on me. There wasn’t anything I could do in AV club but I was just fascinated by the videotape machines and I had them show me how they worked. This was in the days before the VCR was invented. I think I only went there maybe twice. There really wasn’t time to play chess either.

One of the major reasons disabled kids were isolated at Roberts school was that they thought we would be safer there. As I already illustrated in one of the early episodes, disabled kids could be just as nasty to one another and tease one another about their disability as anybody else. At Northwest, I never had anybody even come close to making fun of me or saying anything cringe-worthy.

One time, I was going down the hall and overheard a couple of black guys talking and one of them said, “Get a load of Ironsides over there.” He was referring to the TV show “Ironside” which was the fictional story of Chief of Detectives Robert Ironside played by Raymond Burr. The back story was that he had been shot in the line of duty and became a paraplegic but continued to serve the police department in a wheelchair. He was assisted by a young black man who drove him around in a wheelchair van. The show ran for 195 episodes from 1967-1975 and was quite popular.

Anyway, when the guy called me Ironsides (with an “S”) I thought it was cool. Of course, the name Ironside was sort of a joke because the TV character’s wheelchair (and mine) had metal sides. Anyway, I stopped and turned to him and said, “You can call me that if you want.” He turned to his buddies laughing and sounding like Eddie Murphy when he said, “You hear what he say? He say we can call him Ironsides.” He then turned to me, “You cool man… You cool.” I don’t think anybody except that one guy ever called me that but I liked the nickname.

The only other sketchy thing that ever happened was while I was outside waiting for the bus one day. A clean-cut-looking white guy struck up a conversation with me. He opened a large textbook with pages cut out of the center. Inside this hidden compartment was a bunch of drugs. He asked me if I was interested. I told him, “My body is already messed up. I can’t afford to mess up my mind. It’s the only thing I got going for me.”

He replied, “That’s cool man. No pressure. Take care.” He walked away and I never saw him again. I never felt unsafe during that incident or any other time for the three years I attended.

While I appreciated that I was getting a good education and I enjoyed the academic challenges it afforded me, the real value was that I was living a genuine high school experience. I was making new friends on a regular basis. Keep in mind I had been going to school with the same bunch of kids for many years – some since kindergarten. I didn’t have many opportunities to make new friends. By the time I got to high school many of my Roberts friends had moved on to regular school.

The opportunities for girl-watching were phenomenal even though I never tried to date anyone. We had a bookstore where you could go by a notebook or a pad of paper as well as discount tickets to the school sporting events. We had pep rallies in the gymnasium. The halls were decorated with posters during homecoming. These were all experiences I had never had and never could’ve had at Roberts. Sure I made the move for academic reasons but the intangibles are what made the experience most enjoyable.

I tried to explain to my friends back at Roberts what they were missing but I don’t think they really understood. They knew they had it easy and they weren’t interested in giving that up even if they could. Eventually, as I kept telling stories about what was going on in the real high school, I think some of them grew to live through me vicariously. Of course, the guys were most interested in my descriptions of the girl-watching availability. They didn’t bother to ask if I had a girlfriend. It was a foregone conclusion that I probably didn’t. And they were right. That’s not to say that I wasn’t friendly with girls. I had a girl for a lab partner in biology and we got along okay. But I knew there weren’t any dating possibilities. We will talk more about that in the later episodes.

Overall, the experiment was a success. Apart from some initial minor glitches, my first year as a sophomore at Northwest was educational, enjoyable, and uneventful.

Next week we will talk about my junior year at Northwest and some unfortunate academic choices that were made for me.

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Recently I was sharing the podcast with one of my home health aides. We listened to it while she was getting me dressed and into my wheelchair. I noticed that at the end of the podcast, I asked for comments or feedback. I think I put that in because I was expressing some somewhat controversial positions. Even when I’m not pontificating, I still welcome any comments, questions, or feedback you have about the podcast. Is there something you’d like to know more about? Always feel free to ask me anything.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.