Yearbook slight won't happen again

District promises to be more careful about how it shows members of handicapped class, By Becca Tucker Hardyston - In the Hardyston Township School’s 2009 yearbook, photos of the six students in the elementary school’s multiple-disabled class appeared without names. They were also not the standard portraits, but candid shots that show the children in what one mother calls an “undignified” and “humiliating” light. No one disputes that it was an honest mistake — that the children should have been presented with their classmates, as others were — but this mother thinks that not enough was done to rectify it. One of the students whose name was not listed is 6-year-old Dylan Verga. In the portrait taken at school by LifeTouch studios, Dylan looks like any boy his age, with protruding ears and a football T-shirt. But due to a mix-up, that photo did not run in the yearbook. In the two candid shots of him that did appear, Dylan is sitting in an aide’s lap, and it is clear that he is handicapped. Dylan was diagnosed with moderate autism at 18 months. He is easily over-stimulated and struggles with communication. Last year, he was in a private school, but this year he participated in the fledgling program at Hardyston for handicapped students. When Toni Verga’s second-grade daughter brought home her yearbook and Verga saw the pictures of Dylan, she called the superintendent, Anthony Norod. They met, and Verga asked Norod to send a letter to every parent who’d purchased a yearbook with the portraits and names that had been omitted. Norod, who has been in the Hardyston School District for 35 years — 25 as an administrator and 10 as a teacher — told the Advertiser-News that 350 letters plus postage was an added expense the school district could not absorb at that time. The two yearbook advisors wrote a letter of apology to the families of the six students explaining the error, offering to refund the purchase and committing to increase next year’s special needs section from one to two pages. “The other parents of those children had no problem with that,” he said, but “Mrs. Verga raised a fuss.” Being part of the community The staff at Hardyston “always tell us ‘Oh, we need Dylan to be in-district because we want him to be part of our community,’” said Verga. She used to be an aide at the school, but left so that she would be free to be a vocal parent. “We want to get him out in the community; we want people to know who he is. This is in direct conflict with what they’re telling me one of the benefits of being in-district is. What I asked them to do is a simple thing — to get him out there in the community and show the other parents, and he says it’s not in the budget.” Verga’s intention is not to attack the school district, she said, but to be an educated advocate and to demand the same treatment and respect for her son as other students get. The multiple-handicapped program is two years old. Last year it consisted of three students. The yearbook included their portraits and names, and candid photos of them on a field trip and on a swing. This year, the candid photos were taken indoors, and one shows a boy screaming. “That’s the nature of the disability,” says Norod. “That’s part of the program. Those things happen. You’ve got one kid who yells and screams and one kid who won’t stop talking.” Before the program’s creation, said Norod, multiple-disabled students were taught out of district, in other schools in Sussex and Morris counties. Now the students don’t have to travel long distances and classes are coordinated within the district. They receive occupational therapy, speech therapy and physical therapy in-house, and work on communication through song. Norod points to two children who were in a special ed preschool program last year and will be entering a regular kindergarten class next year as an inclusiveness success story. But Verga said that her son’s class is often referred to by other students as “the retards,” and thinks the yearbook pictures intensify that stigma. Norod investigated that claim by talking to the teacher, David Fencsak, and “every one of those aides,” and “not one of them ever heard one of those students being called retards,” he said. Fifth-graders volunteered to go into the multiple-disabled class to read to them, he said. “This school system has gone way out of its way to serve children with disabilities,” said Norod. “It wasn’t that we ignored it when it was brought to our attention. We looked into every aspect of it. We went out of our way to make sure that that wasn’t happening (kids being called “retards”). This was an unfortunate thing that happened, and both advisors were very upset about it. I think we went way out of our way to make sure it won’t happen again.”