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Dear John,
In middle school, I left a class early and found my brother kneeling by his locker. My brother loves historic, military airplanes. A science teacher had learned about my brother’s passion and brought him magazines about planes that Ned was storing in his locker. Those magazines were now torn apart and strewn all over the hallway and Ned was quietly picking them up by himself. I went over to him and asked what had happened. He just shrugged and kept picking them up without looking at me, his head bent with undeserved shame. I could tell that Ned didn’t want to throw anything away and was trying to recover the damaged pages so he could still read them. I started helping him and asked if he was okay. He didn’t respond. Even as more students filtered into the hallway in between classes, I didn’t hear my brother answer a single question that was addressed to him.
My parents met with the Dean of Middle School. I watched Ned stare out the car window as they argued over that meeting on our way home from school. The Dean essentially said that there wasn’t much the school could do for my brother and suggested that he take his magazines home instead of storing them in his locker. They didn’t have the resources to meet my brother’s needs, which should have involved counseling and a school-wide initiative of learning how to embrace and be comfortable with neurodiversity. This was the origin of my biggest fear - that the societal mistreatment and neglect - the bullying of my brother - was going to take Ned’s life. From then on, I watched Ned for signs of depression and for signs that he was contemplating suicide.
I had always hoped that my Day One and I would live to be 100 years old together.
I worked with autistic students in Richmond elementary public schools. I sat with them during lunch, worked on their social skills, and I also tutored them in math class. I came in one day to one of the schools having a field day in the gym. There was laughter and music bouncing off the walls and I was searching through the various stations to find my kids. I finally had to go ask a teacher because I couldn’t find any of them. They were all sitting in a quiet classroom together with a worksheet, their heads bent with the same undeserved shame that I had seen my brother wearing as he kneeled in the hallway by his locker. Apparently, their “good behavior” hadn’t met the threshold necessary to be admitted to the field day in the gym. When I met with the principal and expressed my outrage at this decision, she asked me if I had considered how stretched thin the teachers were and that they wouldn’t be able to accommodate students with behavioral differences because the school was limited on staff and resources.
Just last week, Philly parents were tweeting about autistic students being left behind from a field trip to the Please Touch Museum – which is very autism-friendly!
Bullying works. It makes people feel ashamed for their differences so they don’t ask for help or accommodations. When resources are limited, those in power have been led to believe that they need to make the choice of leaving people behind, and those people are always the most vulnerable. Republicans have bullied our children into the shadows for too long.
Defunding schools looks like large classroom sizes, classroom ceilings collapsing on students, kids going without school lunches, and surviving sweltering school days without air conditioning.
But it also feels extraordinarily painful for those on the frontline. And those on the frontline are our kids. I had a little girl come up to me, tug me down to her eye level, and ask me, “do we matter to you?”
“Of course you matter to me!” I said.
“No, not to you,” as she gestured around me. “To this country. To the United States of America.”
I don’t believe in allowing this system to hurt our children any longer. I believe in fighting tooth and nail for every child to have the resources they need to get the education they deserve.
As Philadelphia City Controller, I will work tirelessly on the financial strategy to fund the Philadelphia School District that will navigate around Republicans' abusive power and efforts to leave schools penniless. I will build a replicable model that can be shared nationally, so no child anywhere knows what it feels like to be bullied or be unchosen. If the federal government will not meet our needs in this crisis, we will organize from the ground up, starting with local government.
I can’t possibly do this without you. My brother is now 29 — in honor of my Day One, will you chip in $29 to our campaign for Philadelphia City Controller today?
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