For This Teacher, Student’s Smile Represents Triumph

For special education teacher Sally Richards, each day follows a rhythm that seldom varies, starting when the school buses with wheelchair lifts arrive at Edison School.

She and two aides greet her 10 profoundly handicapped, medically fragile pupils and push them in their tall, padded chairs into her classroom.

Edison is a Los Angeles County public school solely for children with severe handicaps. Richards’ students have the worst problems.

For a little more than five hours a day, Richards moves these youngsters out of their chairs and onto mats or bean bags, diapers them, feeds them by hand or, for some, through gastrotomy tubes, and stimulates them with toys or her most effective tool, music.

Mostly, says Richards, she tries to make them smile.

“They all have their favorite records. I taped a compact disc of Mozart, the sound track from ‘Amadeus,’ and they love it with the earphones on. One little girl just kicks her legs and moves her arms. They laugh when they hear their favorite song.”

She feels that educators and psychologists who use intelligence tests are off target with profoundly retarded children.

Terms Mean ‘Nothing’

“They test them and say (something) like, ‘This child is operating between a six- and a nine-month level.’ But to me that means nothing,” she said. “I want to know if he can crawl or sit up and hold a spoon or pick up food. It’s real hard for me to look at a 20-year-old young man and say he’s operating on a 9-month-old level. I can’t relate to that.”

Richards and her aides reposition the students every 30 to 45 minutes--a demanding task because many of the students have no muscle tone.

“They need to go from their back to their stomach, or the stomach to the back. We have three that can sit up with help, so for 10 minutes we’ll work with those kids,” she said.

“I like the physical part of the job,” she explained. “I like all the moving. And I like the kids. It’s hard to explain.”

Lunchtime is a slow process, usually over an hour. A cart of food is delivered to Richards’ classroom and “we prepare it by blending or chopping their food. We have to put them all back into their wheelchairs to feed them. None of them can hold a spoon or move the food to their mouth by themselves.”

After eating, the children are pushed outside to sit in the sunshine.

‘We Do Everything’

Afternoons might include an art project “where they smell fruit and then do a fruit painting with their fingers. We move them through it. We do everything,” said Richards.

“Our kids have kind of joined the rest of the school. We had special olympics. They had contests like holding a balloon, smiling brightly and standing tall,” she said.

Preparation for the trip home or, for most, to state institutions begins a half hour before the buses arrive at 2:45 p.m.

“A lot of personal hygiene goes on, especially for the kids that live in the institutions. If we send them home in mismatched clothes and their hair’s a mess, and their teeth not brushed, then they (the institution staff) start losing respect for them. The better they look, the better they’re taken care of,” she said.

“What’s most important to me is to see them happy and comfortable and well taken care of,” Richards said. “They just changed one boy’s medication, and he’s smiling and laughing out loud for the first time. For me, that’s a lot of progress.”