The other reason was my disability. You can try to change things all you want, and believe me my mom and I fought for every aspect of my education from the time I started preschool until we moved. We fought for handicapped parking spaces, accessible bathrooms, elevators, you name it. We fought against teachers who were to ignorant to know how to teach me properly, or didn’t care. Administrators who were either completely oblivious to what was going on or too mean to care. Almost everyone seemed to have no clue how to handle a handicapped student. However, there were some who did teach me correctly and when I was in those environments much like now at King, I thrived. I was at the top of my class in those years. I was actually happy…

Anyway when I was in fourth grade, dealing with the problems I mentioned before, began to kick my ass mentally. Before long, I was coming home crying, begging to go to a different school. That went on for a year before my mom understood how bad it was for me. Then, she got me into a different school. That next year was great for me, but by middle school, the same things happened as before. New school that wasn’t accessible to me in most aspects, teachers were horrible to me; life itself was out of control. By the end of my time in Ohio my mom and I started going to school board meetings to make some of the things that were legally required , but weren’t being done in the schools get done. I had to speak up for the other disabled kids who literally can’t speak or speak well enough to convey their needs, not to mention the parents who don’t speak up for them because they don’t expect their kids to improve.

We got a lot done. There are handicapped parking spaces, accessible restrooms and a new elevator that weren’t in the county schools before us, but there’s only so much we could take. I don’t know if there was one final thing that made us decide we’d had enough or just the insane amount of issues with students making fun of me, teachers, and administrators, but between school and the fact that our area was also not accessible. It didn’t even have public transportation. So, I had to depend on my family to get me everywhere.