Now may the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times and in every way. Thessalonians 3:16

April 25, 2012 Today I worked on Sammy’s Angel Miracle Network. The setup of the website is going well. I hope to have it on line by late next week. I am looking forward to raising donations and distributing them. I have designed a special T-shirt for the website. For donations of $25.00 or more, free T-shirt will be given. When you make your donation on our secure PayPal donation site, you can specify the size of the T-shirt. T-shirts are 100% cotton, preshrunk. All the donations will go towards the bills of individuals or families we will spotlight on our website. If you know of anyone in need of financial assistance during their life altering illness, please refer them to our website or send in information about them yourself. We will make contact with them to see how we might be able to help. I read an article in the Austin American Statesman about a local school district who believes that too much emphasis has been put on testing and not enough on teaching. You know, the way it used to be before No Child Left Behind (NCLB) changed the course of learning in America. Now with the impending deadline for reaching the goal of 100% of all children in the United States expected to pass state testing, many school districts will fall short of this goal. I believe we need to have standards set to assist students in learning, not testing. Our curriculum could use an overhaul with more attention paid to content subject matter and practical application in real life simulated situations. It seems to me that NCLB discriminates against special education students because it does not take into account the special learning needs of this student population. Special education was designed to offer a special learning environment to assist students with special needs by offering a modified curriculum with grade level content. This content would be taught using the identified the best learning modality of each student. Testing could be designed to test those skills on the students’ level of learning with set goals for future progress as goals are accomplished. When I started school, special education did not exist. You had two general career paths: college or the work force. Joining a military branch was also an option but not one promoted by many schools. At the time you didn’t need a high school diploma to sign up for the military. Now, they require at least a GED. Special education services have come a long way since its inception in1975 with the passing of House Bill 19141. That is until the signing of NCLB. Now school districts across the country are scrambling to apply for waivers from having to enforce NCLB. They will still be held accountable for student learning and progress but not under the gun of NCLB. I am hoping this will ease the stress placed on teachers who have been pressured to produce passing student test scores or lose their jobs. My most memorable year in school was during the 1963-1964 school year. I was attending an elementary school in west Baltimore. My 3rd. grade teacher had promoted me to a “high performing” 4th grade class because of the work I did for her in the 3rd. grade. I may have been successful that year but a series of events affected my behavior and attention, causing me to fail that grade. President John Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. The whole country was affected by his death. My family had moved to the neighborhood surrounding the school after a series of family dramas that had a profound effect on my life. A year before, my mother and father had separated twice. My mother, brothers, and I lived in two different homes after my mother left my father. First we had an apartment. Then, they got back together. We all moved to a house but my father’s behavior did not changed even though he swore it would. My parents continued to fight and argue. Eventually, they separated again, living in the same house but avoiding one another. My father kept drinking, making our lives miserable at every opportunity. He succeeded in throwing my brother Tom out of the house. We had very little to eat. The one Christmas we had in that house was a lean and sad holiday. The only money my mother had coming in was a Social Security check for my brothers from her first husband’s death. Finally, my parents got back together again. My brother David, mother, father, and I moved to west Baltimore, leaving my brother Tom to fend for himself. I hardly ever saw him again after that. Several years later our father allowed him to come visit us. He was married by then. Things started getting better with his first son in 1965. Our daily lives were always in turmoil. That’s the way it is living with a mentally ill individual who refuses to take medication or go to therapy. Their lives are always in turmoil. So in turn, those closest to them are immediately affected. Weekends were the worse. My father was able to keep his act together during the week because he worked Monday through Friday. When Friday night came around, he was drunk before he came home from work. He would stop at a bar on the way home to drink. We lived in terror not knowing what to expect from him when he did come home. He came in to the house loud and verbally abusive, dredging up family problems from the past blaming my mother for the problems. He never gave us a minute of peace all weekend. We were always on edge. Nights were the hardest. He would continue to drink long after we would go to bed. Then, without warning, he would turn all of the lights on in the house, and wake us up to dredge up more past family problems, keeping us awake until well into the early morning hours. When the school week started on Monday, I was tired and a nervous wreck. I couldn’t focus on my work. The only attention I received at home was negative, so I began to act out in school for attention. I was disruptive throughout my 4th grade year (the first one), and learned very little. I repeated the 4th grade because of this. I fell behind academically in every grade after that. My first 4th grade teacher did not help me at all. She had no tolerance for behavior problems and seemed happy to fail me. My only concern was how my family would react. When I took my report card home at the end of the school year and they found out I had to repeat the 4th grade, no one said anything to me at all. This helped me cope more with failing. I kept it to myself and never told anyone else in the neighborhood. I knew they would find out at the beginning of the next school year. Mrs. Jordon was my second 4th grade teacher. She was different from the first 4th grade teacher. Mrs. Jordon cared about me. She treated me much better than the teacher the year before. I felt valued in her classroom. I actually learned something that year, and I was the only student with perfect attendance in her classroom. Having someone care for you and respect you as a child, makes all the difference in the world in your success. Her classroom became a safe place for me after long weekends of listening to my father verbally abuse me. I looked forward to going to her class every day. Until that school year, I was treated like a flunky, not very bright, always distracted, shy, quiet, not a thinking person. But it is hard to be attentive, cognitively aware, and outgoing when you are a nervous, anxious, and depressed child. I was always in survival mode. For those people who still wonder why I moved half way across the country to live, I hope the answer is becoming a little more clear. I had to get away. I saw no future in a city where bad memories lingered around every corner. Moving to Texas gave me a second chance to start my life over again.