Tuesday, May 22, 2012

High School Memories with a New Twist

First, credit absolutely goes to the folks who discovered the error and corrected it... but WOW what an error!

A highschool in Mesquite Texas had a section in their yearbook where all the kids with disabilities were pictured with a list of their diagnoses... You can read about it here. (We will leave discussion of their use of outdated terminology for another day!)

My first thought was that the kids with disabilities either didn't have any happy events from their school year to highlight--or if they did that no one noticed them...

But, apparently the school has said that they were trying to 'honor the students for their struggles.' (I will pause while you gag!)

Kind of a novel concept for a yearbook really. They should do it for all the students...

Can you imagine all the family problems, poverty, acne, bad breakups, addictions, social struggles, hormones, academic challenges, mean-girl-itis and mean-boy-itis, bad hair days etc, etc, etc that high school kids contend with actually made it to the pages of the yearbook... probably would make the most honest, painful yearbook ever... that no one would buy or show their kids EVER!!!

Traditionally the message of the HS yearbook is that among all of the true pain of living and adolescence some great, fun things happen... I am glad this school realized this was true for ALL kids before their yearbook got distributed.



No comments: