How many kids do you know with either a mental or physical disability? It isn’t ok the way they are treated just because they are a little bit different. It is not fair that all of those harsh words are forced upon them because of something they can’t even control. Similar to what Martin Luther King Jr. said, “One day...little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers,” (King 3). In the same way, I have a dream that one day disabled children will be treated as equals among all other children.
Children with disabilities such as autism, dyslexia, and others have a hard time learning in school, and being social with their friends. Some schools have special programs to help those kids that do not function like the rest of the kids, but there are a lot of schools and teachers that lack the ability to really understand what that child is going through. The teachers try to help the kids but it is hard for them. Kids with disabilities often act different to the rest of the kids, and others just think that they are weird or strange and don’t bother to try to figure out why they act the way that they do. Some teachers will notice that other kids are bothered by what a disabled child does. They don’t normally know what to do in this situation to help the disabled child, so they often send them out of the classroom to talk to a guidance counselor or a paraprofessional. This might seem like the best choice to help the class stay on track, but think about how the disabled child feels. These children often feel as if the teacher doesn’t like them and thinks that the teacher doesn’t want them in their class. And in reality the guidance counselor or paraprofessional the teacher send the child to doesn’t know how to handle them any differently than the teacher would. My brother has a form of autism so I have experienced all of this second hand. I remember when my brother went to Tyngsborough Elementary School, he was often made fun of by the rest of the kids in his grade. He would hear someone say something that made him mad and when the teacher saw his reaction she automatically blamed him for just about everything, even if he didn’t do anything wrong. He would talk to the guidance counselor who was a lot of help at first, but once he got back to the classroom his day would just take a drastic turn for the worst. He would come home from school everyday and tell our parents about how terribly he was treated. He explained it as though he was trying to make things right but because of every little thing he did someone tried to make fun of him. He has been treated this way just because he acts a little bit differently than everyone else.
When the founding fathers of our country wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men would be created equal they surely did not mean for children with disabilities to be treated as if they were from another planet. They did not want these kids to feel pushed away from having friends and feeling included. This is not a country that should be judging someone on how they act, or even because they don’t understand how to interact with other people. How can we stand back and watch children who don’t know what they are doing wrong get punished for what they think is right?
Speech is a power, a power to convince, a power to persuade, and most of all a power to show how you feel
