Pressed for Time
This will have to be the short version without too many researched links because I only have a limited amount of time in which to write this post. Those of you who are caregivers for people with severe disabilities will probably appreciate this fact of life. Or maybe this is the modern human condition in general.
Adaptive Physical Education
In the #USA we have some laws: Education of all Handicapped Children Act of 1975, Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act that essentially means that students with disabilities can join in all the reindeer games. You see, at least in the classic video Siobhan likes so much, Rudolph has a disability. His nose glows. Anyway, Siobhan was eligible for lots of services and Adaptive Physical Education (APE) was one of them. Again, pressed for time, I won’t go into all the less than effective methods of providing APE for kids who need it. Next time you’re among a crowd of severely disabled people notice how many seem fit and trim to you. I rest my case.
Swimming Achieved
One of Siobhan’s early APE teachers said that he would like to teach her to swim and he did so. Just like that. She was in school in Malibu at that time. We’re in the Santa Monica/Malibu Unified School District, just to explain how she came to attend a Malibu school. She had a long bus ride to and from the school and other aspects of it were very bad for Siobhan but Gary, the APE guy really did begin the process of teaching Siobhan to swim. This was nothing short of a miracle as far as I was concerned. Thank you Gary.
Pool Access
The next year Siobhan did not go back to Malibu, She came back into Santa Monica where it was easy to drive her to school. And we wanted her to continue her swim program which was the only part of APE that she was benefiting from. She can’t run, and she can’t jump, and she can’t kick a ball easily, but she can swim. There are some details I’m going to get wrong since I’m writing this quickly, but what I remember about this stage of events is that the school principal wanted to keep Siobhan out of the pool. If she had a bathroom accident in the pool they said they’d have to drain the pool and charge us for cleaning and replacing the water. This probably sounds familiar to other people who have been banned from facilities use because of the color of their skin, or their religion, or any number of other things. In any event, we persevered and got pool access, and Siobhan never had a bathroom accident and by the way Olympic swimmers pee in the pool all the time.
Lifelong Skill
Nobody expected that Siobhan would go on to win Special Olympics gold medals because they see her disabilities and dismiss her. This is the essence of disablism. We have had to fight for pool access ever after that, including in the present, now that she’s out of the school system, but Siobhan continues to swim four or five times a week. And she’s trim and fit. And it was all worth it. Just this week she had a tough time with two other swimmers in her lane at a public pool but she persevered. As Dory in “Finding Nemo” says: Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, just keep swimming…