Down’s Child Gives Lesson in Determination

Suzanne Bobbett, Susie for short, has been in Girl Scouts for years, selling cookies, going camping, all that kind of stuff. She’s 12. She loves jazz dance, too, except she’s stopped lessons for a while because she’s pretty busy these days. She takes piano.

And even when there’s no school, Susie does a lot of homework--her mother sees to that--and then she’ll play around with her two brothers.

“Susie, stop pulling at your eye like that,” James, who’s 10, tells his big sister. “It makes it look funny.”

Susie gives James a look, but then she stops. So even little brothers can have a point.

Susie and James have just come home from school, which is around the corner a couple blocks. They have recess together, but different lunch periods. They meet after school for the walk home; they like that a lot.

This is really no big deal, it would seem, except that you should have seen Martina Bobbett, mother of the house, on the first day of school. It was like she had to jump-start her heart a few times. She was worried, a bit scared, and deliriously happy too.

Karin Lynch, assistant superintendent for personnel/special services at the Fullerton Elementary School District, gave her a call that day, around 1 o’clock.

“She said that she had stopped by to see Suzanne and that she’s doing just fine,” Martina says. “I was really touched by that. She said, ‘Now you can breathe again.’ ”

Martina’s smiling now, occasionally laughing, telling me the story of how it was that Susie came to attend the fifth grade at Rolling Hills Elementary School, just like any other kid, even though this kid is not like most.

Susie was born with Down’s syndrome. This makes her stand out.

Last year, Martina went to Susie’s old school--where she was bused in as a special-education student--to talk to the non-handicapped fifth- and sixth-graders about what Down’s syndrome means.

“I remember one little girl put up her hand and she said, ‘Susie has a lot of confidence.’ And I looked at her, and then she said, ‘One time, a boy got on the bus and walked by Susie and said, ‘You’re ugly !’ And Susie said, ‘No, I’m not. I’m pretty. My mom says I am.’ ”

Martina says much more to her daughter, of course. Giving up, for example, is not allowed. Self-confidence is key. Love, from family and friends, permeates it all. Sure, sometimes people say mean things. Aren’t you lucky, Susie, that you aren’t like them?

“All you can do is feel sorry for these people because they are not happy inside,” Martina says. “Happy people don’t try to hurt other people.”

Susie Bobbett is what the experts call a “high-functioning Down’s child,” although such labels make those who know Susie uncomfortable. Her mother stresses that she doesn’t want to limit her abilities, or her future, in any way.

That’s why a year ago, the Bobbetts and the parents of two other handicapped children--one with Down’s and the other, legally blind--went to the school district as a group to ask that their kids be fully integrated into regular classrooms. The parents of a fourth child, who also has Down’s, went separately to ask the same.

This was a new thing, something that may or may not work, with some added costs, and, well, the district wasn’t really sure it wanted to take a chance. Still, the idea intrigued. There were meetings, many meetings, and then some more.

Sometimes the parents were frustrated because things were moving so slowly, if indeed they could characterize them as moving at all. Then again, sometimes they wondered themselves about the wisdom of getting their wish. What if the experts who had assigned their children to special-ed classes were right after all?

The district, meanwhile, had “concerns”--and so did the teachers’ association. Teachers already have plenty of “special” students as it is. There are drug babies, children who speak little English and others with too many problems at home. Teachers deal with it all up close.

And what would parents of non-handicapped children think? Would they worry that a teacher was spending too much time with the handicapped child?

But in the end, and for the time being at least, the apprehension and the kinks have been overcome. School principals and teachers have volunteered to help make the idea work. A “full inclusion” team was formed. So far, it’s a thumbs up all around.

Karin Lynch, the assistant superintendent, calls it a little pilot program, involving the four kids--all of them considered severely handicapped, two especially so. As of last week, they were all in regular classrooms full time. All but one of the children now attend their neighborhood schools.

Although Susie and her family, natives of Ireland, have lived at the same Fullerton home for five years, Susie was always bused to other schools to attend special-education class. Most of her classmates were far less advanced; some couldn’t talk, many could hardly move.

“You just think after all, ‘Why?’ ” Martina says. “We work hard to live in the best area we can. Why can’t we have anything close to home? Susie has always been completely integrated in everything else. We thought, ‘Why should school be such a segregated part of her life?’ ”

Cal State Long Beach assistant professor Marquita Grenot-Scheyer, an expert in special education, says she decided to help the Fullerton parents because “if it was going to work anywhere, it was going to work in Fullerton. It’s one of the most progressive districts around.”

Full inclusion is happening elsewhere too--at least two other such children are attending regular classes in Orange County.

At the California Research Institute in San Francisco, Dotty Kelly says that as part of a federally funded project, she’s identified 100 schools across the country doing the same thing. That translates to about 250 severely handicapped children, most of them on the East Coast, fully integrated into regular class.

The reason is parents are pushing for it. They say their children are better off.

But many, if not most, school districts strongly resist the idea. The vast majority of severely handicapped children are still segregated, some in completely separate schools.

Yet the Fullerton district says it is eager for its new program to work. “It’s important, from a social and a societal standpoint, to fully integrate these children,” saysKarin Lynch.

Mary Turner, the principal at Rolling Hills, adds this: “I think it’s important to get used to being with people who aren’t like us. We need to accept the humanity in each other.”

Charlene Goltz, Susie’s teacher, says she remembers having several handicapped children in her classes when she was a student in elementary school. It was no big deal.

So far, that’s how it’s going in her classroom now. The kids are getting along, helping Susie here and there, when she asks. The teacher says Susie--who’s been assigned a teaching aide by the district--takes up no more of her time than any other child.

As for Susie, she owns up to being a little scared about it all. Who wouldn’t be, starting a new school? But she says it’s turning out to be pretty neat.

“I liked it,” she says. “I had fun there. The other kids said, ‘Susie, you’re nice. I like your clothes’ and stuff . . . . I like to fit in with people and play with them. I just want to push in and be part of the gang.”

Just like anybody else, Susie says, at least in the ways that really count.

In the meantime, this fifth-grader says she’s finished with her homework, and I’m about to leave. Susie says it was nice seeing me and flashes me a smile.

Now she’s off to play. “James!”