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| AUTISTIC GIRL EMILY BUCZEK PLAYS IN HER HOME IN TORONTO TUESDAY MAY 10TH, 2011. (Credits: Toronto Sun/QMI Agency) |
TORONTO - You would think severely disabled children and their families have enough to handle, without getting kicked out of school, too.
But that is the case for 14-year-old Emily Buczek, who is autistic, diagnosed as developmentally-delayed and cannot speak. Emily has been at her Etobicoke home colouring and surfing the web since April 7.
She's been banned from her special needs high school, Drewry Secondary, under a "refusal to admit" letter, done under the authority of the Education Act.
The letter says Emily's presence "is detrimental to the physical and mental well-being of students in the School" because she has been "physically aggressive towards staff, herself and other students."
The Toronto District School Board would not disclose details about Emily's case to me, citing confidentiality, but the board's senior superintendent for special education, Karen Forbes, said such a move is done as "a last resort and it is not to be permanent in any way, shape, or form."
Emily's mother, Christina, plans to appeal the ban. She says a Drewry staff member ended up with bruises to the arms after Christina's five-foot-tall, 100-pound daughter - who has two educational aides assigned to help her - pinched the person in an outburst her mom says is often related to anxiety and stress.
"She's high needs, she can be physical," admits Christina, a former chair of the TDSB's special education committee.
But Christina says this is the latest episode in a situation that has gone up and down for Emily since last September when she moved on to high school from elementary. That situation could have been avoided had Emily - who has two educational aides, partly paid for under a $27,000 grant her disabilities generate - got the right people assigned to her and the right programs.
‘Very unfair'
Instead, Buczek believes the board bungled the timely hiring of appropriate personnel knowledgeable about how to work with autistic children like Emily and prevent the situations leading to the outbursts she has displayed.
"It's very unfair," says Christina.
While "refusal to admit" letters are rare according to several different places I checked, kicking a special needs kid out of school is not and has gone on for years across Ontario under different guises, says a disability rights lawyer.
"You want to make sure you have a mechanism to protect all students," acknowledges Robert Lattanzio, staff lawyer for ARCH Disability Law Centre, a community legal clinic.
"But that isn't what we're talking about here. What we're talking about in many of these cases is a complete failure to accommodate ... The real question is, ‘Why weren't those supports working?' Pulling the student seems to be the default mechanism ..."
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