|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Empathy Part of Life’s Lessons Incident drives parent to teach students sensitivity toward disabled peers By JENNIFER BOOTH REED, jreed@news-press.com It should have been one of those big life moments, the type of thing a mother tucks away in a happy memory and preserves in a family photo album. Lisa Cronin Miller’s little girl was going to her first middle school dance, and she planned to tag along as a chaperone.
A gleeful 11-year-old Rachal and her classmates danced even as they walked to Bonita Springs Middle School’s cafeteria, burst into the darkened dining room-turned-dance hall and prepared to dance the hours away. Faces turned. Eyes stared. Then, the children laughed at, pointed to and imitated Rachal and her classmates, who are mentally and physically disabled. Cronin Miller’s should-have-been-happy memory instead is this: Five boys clustered in a circle laughing at her daughter and the others as they retreated to the safety of their classroom. “I just can’t explain how much it hurt — that rejection, rejection, rejection,” said Cronin Miller, retelling the story from her living room while Rachal watched TV nearby and her two sons played upstairs. She had only recently moved Rachal to public school after years of cloistered private schools for the disabled. “What am I doing?” Cronin Miller remembers thinking. “I’ve blown it.” Then, her disgust morphed into determination. Perhaps, she reasoned, these middle schoolers simply needed a lesson in tolerance. Perhaps they needed to hear Rachal’s story. After a frenzied few weeks of brainstorming and research, Cronin Miller emerged with a Sensitivity Awareness Workshop, Inc. that gives students a taste of what it’s like to live with a disability. She produced a short video explaining the seizures that rocked Rachal’s once-healthy infant body and damaged her mind. While Cronin Miller wants to reach every child in her daughter’s school — which is also her own former middle school — she said the need for this type of training extends well beyond a single group of students. Cronin Miller wants to take her program across the district and then across the state. The stay-at-home mother decided this would become her life’s work along with raising Rachal, 7-year-old Josh and 14-year-old Ben. “If it wasn’t for the rejection, the need wouldn’t have come,” Cronin Miller said. Then, two weeks ago, her husband Ray Miller decided this was his calling, too. He previously worked in information technology and sales but now serves as his wife’s director of development. “We had always felt the Lord had given us Rachal for a reason,” Ray Miller said. “It just felt right. We said, ‘Let’s make a go of it.’” The couple hopes that grants and contracts with Florida school districts will support their new enterprise. Cronin Miller said her husband’s expertise has kicked the fledgling program into high gear. “It feels better already,” said a smiling Cronin Miller of her husband’s decision. “He wants to infiltrate the next five counties,” she said. “I’m thinking, ‘Wait, I don’t even have my business cards yet.’” Rachal’s Story When the Millers tell their daughter’s story, they talk about the abruptness of tragedy. “One of these kids could have an accident in the car with their parents and end up mentally or physically impaired,” Cronin Miller said. She certainly never expected her healthy newborn daughter would end up with mental retardation, autistic tendencies, developmental delays and epilepsy. Rachal had her first seizure at 6 weeks old. For months, the episodes wracked her tiny body — sometimes four times a day, sometimes 70 times. When Rachal was 6 months old, the seizures gave way to little short spasms — almost like hiccups, her father said. “We thought she had gotten better, but she had gotten worse,” Miller said. Doctors in Maryland, where the family lived, diagnosed Rachal with infantile spasms, a condition that strikes one in 10,000 babies. Three-quarters of all children diagnosed with infantile spasms are left with retardation. About half will have cerebral palsy. “I don’t think she recognizes me anymore,” Cronin Miller remembers telling a doctor. “I’m losing her. The neurologist said, ‘Yes, you are.’” The Millers didn’t know whether Rachal would live or die. Doctors put her on a steroid that stopped the spasms but left her irritable, lethargic and caused her weight to double. Rachal fought her way through all of it, but the damage to her brain was irreversible. The top neurologist treating Rachal told the couple to put their daughter in an institution and concentrate on their healthy son, Ben. “He said, ‘Your marriage will not survive this,’” Cronin Miller said. “Maybe that’s what they really believed, but we never for a day accepted it.” One day Cronin Miller wants to present her daughter to the misguided doctor. “She’s still this fascinating kid,” she said. What the other kids don’t see Rachal’s teacher, Jill Bonnell, doesn’t think students are intentionally cruel. “Most of them, it’s not meanness or out of spite, they’re just uncomfortable,” said Bonnell, who thinks the Millers’ workshop will go a long way in helping students learn tolerance. In fairness, not all students are mean. In a recent physical education class that includes Bonnell’s students, not a single student complained about special-needs children being assigned to their team or did anything to make them feel unwelcome. Aside from special classes like physical education, Bonnell’s 11 students learn, eat and ride buses apart from typical children, giving the larger population no more than a glimpse of them here and there. Cronin Miller wants to concentrate on similarities.
She opens the workshops with the video. On the screen flash photos of Rachal in all the ordinary moments of childhood: Asleep at the high chair, playing with friends, splashing in the pool, grinning in a Santa hat, walking on the beach. In these still and silent snapshots there’s nothing to suggest anything unusual about the dark-haired girl with the wide eyes and the big grin. If students could peek into Rachal’s life they might see even more in common. She admires actresses Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, whose posters adorn her bedroom walls. She loves football, but not as much as she loves NASCAR racing. Her favorite time at school is lunch. “I like hot dogs and pretzels,” she said. When Rachal talks, she’s almost always grinning and her eyes are always dancing as if amused by all who surround her. She delights in racing her big brother on a PlayStation NASCAR game. Ben indulges her — driving his car backward at one point so that he wouldn’t win. Not that that helped with Rachal’s countless crashes. “Oh, man, that’s my bad!” she shouted as her car smashed into a wall. A moment in their shoes Hearing about someone’s life is one thing — living it is another. In the workshop, students try 10 different tasks from talking with their tongues pressed to the roofs of their mouths to writing with their non-dominant hands, all of which replicate the challenges of living with a physical or mental handicap. Cronin Miller’s activities stumped more than a few students during workshops held at Bonita Springs Middle School last Friday. “I don’t even know how to hold the pencil. My hand hurts,” declared 14-year-old Patricia Kuhn after trying to write with her left hand, an activity that shows what it’s like to have a fine-motor disorder. During another session, 14-year-old Hong Choi just stared down at his paper and shook his head. Facilitator Jordan Tarquino, 13, was telling the group to fold a square piece of paper along various angles. She wouldn’t slow down, even when the group fumbled — a lesson in what students who can’t process oral commands experience. Students giggled and grinned, but the Millers and their student helpers continually reminded classes that they could shed their “disabilities” when the workshop ended. “What do you think it would be like to talk like this all the time?” asked 14-year-old Aimee Corbin, who oversaw a station replicating speech disorders. “Would you be frustrated or embarrassed? Would you talk to people?” One student at a time, the couple’s efforts may be working. “I haven’t really treated them very well,” admitted Jonathan Gardner, 12. He pledged to do better in the future. Principal John Basel said he’s excited about the workshop. “There’s a word we want to teach our kids: empathy. Not sympathy, but empathy. That’s not a word that’s in middle school vocabulary,” he said. “Typically, middle school-aged kids are not shy about their feelings and they act before they think. It’s a lack of understanding, and this can teach it to them.” Finally, Cronin Miller left students with this, a mother’s plea: “OK, I have a pretty powerful question for you guys and you don’t have to answer it,” she began. “How many times in a day do you use the word retard?” A few people mumbled, “A lot.” “My daughter has been diagnosed with that. You share your school with people who have been diagnosed with that. It’s an awful, awful thing to say. SAW
of SWFL, Inc. is a Florida 501(c)3 Non Profit Corporation. All
gifts of cash or securities are fully tax deductible under IRS
law. A copy of the official registration and financial information
may be obtained from the division of consumer services by calling
toll free (800-435-7352) within the state. Registration does not
imply endorsement, approval or recommendation by the state. |
