Reflections on Being in Fifth Grade Again

A SDSU basketball game halftime performance by Heartlight, the intra-city dance program my nephew did last year. Hi mom was with us in the audience, just so you know things do get better with time.

It’s been a year exactly since I walked into a fifth-grade class, outwardly smiling and inwardly tormented. I was there to drop off the new student, my nephew whom I would now be raising. I knew right away he did not belong here, this child who had been orphaned and who could neither read nor write. His poor speech and facial birth defects let everyone know immediately he was different.

We’d arrived in San Diego just a week prior after an Oregon family court judge finally took up my petition to move back to California. That request was challenged by his birth mother, who also happens to be my youngest sister. I always thought of myself as an upstanding citizen, but that day in court I realized that my inexperience with legal proceedings handicapped me. My sister knew how to gain the judge’s sympathy. In the end, though, he reluctantly ruled in my favor.

It had been almost 20 years since I’d had a child in fifth grade. I remember sitting in the new student orientation and feeling so out of place with this homesick child and a system I did not know. There’s an assumption that even if new to a school, you are not unfamiliar with public education in general. I hadn’t been a guardian but for a few months, and I hadn’t lived in my hometown for almost seven. That just added to the disorientation as we both muddled through that first day.

We went to his assigned bungalow and I introduced him to his teacher. I’d warned her in an email the day before that my nephew had disabilities, and she told me she’d once taught ILS. I had to look up ILS. What she didn’t tell me was that he actually was supposed to be three bungalows down in the moderate/severe special education classroom.

We entered that brightly decorated fifth-grade room all smiles. A white board message instructed each student to fill out a nametag and arrange themselves by birthdates.  I knew he was trying his hardest to get all the letters right as he wrote out his name. “Remember you were born May 22nd," I whispered as he walked off to engage with other arriving students. He can’t retain information well, but the growing group indulged him, as much confused by what he was saying through slurred speech as they were curious who this new kid was.

That’s how I left him that day. When school let out, I was first at the bungalow door to retrieve him. He smiled and said he liked this place. His animated and exaggerated gestures were a welcomed change after so many months of despair and family drama. 

The next day I began retrieving him from the special ed classroom. He wasn’t happy, saying the kids didn’t listen to the teacher. Some were fixated on certain body parts. One pinched or bit anyone within their grasp. One who joined them midyear kept picking on him for not having a mother or father. 

I could tell he was disappointed to be segregated from his new friends, fully aware he was different again like at his old school.

But a funny thing happened along the way to the Promotion Ceremony 10 months later. He got to spend 51% of his days with that other class, and with the fifth graders in all the classes. And he made friends. Genuine friends who played with him during recess and gave him hugs and high fives before and after school. They invited him to birthday parties and asked about playdates. I thought it was just wishful thinking on my part, that he was well liked despite all his disabilities.

But it wasn’t. This elementary school, with more than 700 students in K-5, didn’t just say it believed in inclusion, it showed it every day. To my child and to all the others. His principal said hello to him by name each morning and afternoon while directing traffic. Gaggles of girls came up to hug him. He became popular, with his peers, teachers and other parents. He had an almost-perfect attendance record, not wanting to ever miss school. 

On one of the last days of the year, in that class where he’d been like all the other fifth-graders for a day, he got to vote for class superlatives. And those kids who initially didn’t know what to make of this tiny kid from Oregon? Well, they suddenly did. They voted him Most Likely to be President.