 
|
|||||||||||||
              
|
Mother of disabled boy stages unusual protest Ties self to school flagpole to press treatment demands Tuesday, August 29, 2000 By Joe Smydo, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
For Ryan "Max " Lesneski, a day at school is like watching a long foreign film, without understanding the language and without subtitles.
That's the picture painted by his mother, Deanna, who tied herself to a flagpole yesterday at Blaine-Buffalo Elementary School to demand a qualified sign-language interpreter and other services for Max, 7, who has Down syndrome and a hearing disability.
It wasn't what officials of the McGuffey School District in western Washington County wanted on the first day of the school year.
Between 9:30 and 10 a.m., after Max had an asthma attack in school, his mother got a jump rope and lawn chair out of the car, tied herself to the flagpole in front of the building and sat down for the day. Under overcast skies, she gathered around her a cellular telephone, sign language dictionary and umbrella.
"I just hope a lightning strike doesn't come, since I have a metal pole here," said Lesneski, 47, of Buffalo.
Around noon, school officials asked Lesneski to end the protest, saying they feared half-day kindergarten students arriving for class would be traumatized by the spectacle.
It was the kindergarten students' "first day of school, ever, in their lives," Sheryl Fleck, the district's director of special education, said later. She said she didn't want the bright-eyed youngsters to wonder why a woman was tied to the flagpole and think to themselves, "Are they going to do that to me?"
But Lesneski, who said she has a form of muscular dystrophy and walks with difficulty, refused to budge.
"I plan on spending the night," she said.
By afternoon, several representatives of Tri-County Patriots for Independent Living, a disability rights organization in Washington, had joined the protest. The contingent planned to spend the night at the school, too, said John Lorence Jr., a civil rights specialist with the organization.
Lesneski said she had grown frustrated with previous, low-key attempts to force the school district into compliance with the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, the national special-education law.
Max, a second-grader, cannot communicate with his teachers or peers because of the hearing disability, his mother said from the seat she did not leave all day, not even to use the restroom.
"He can't say, 'I'm sick, take me home; help me; I have to go to the bathroom,' " Lesneski said, adding Max wet himself last school year because of the problem communicating.
Max knows sign language, but the school won't provide a qualified interpreter, she said. Nor, she said, will school officials program a speech synthesizer that he could use to speak for him.
Fleck and Dennis Makel, school district solicitor, said the staff members working with Max have been trained in sign language. But Lesneski said they aren't proficient.
Also, Lesneski said school officials told her they won't administer Max's medications this year -- and that's what sparked the protest.
When Max had the asthma attack, she said, he tried to use the inhaler himself. Lesneski said a school employee called to tell her what had happened, prompting her to drive to the school. She said the protest was an impulse move.
Makel and Fleck contradicted Lesneski's account, saying the district will give Max his medicines.
The district has failed to meet Max's needs in other ways, too -- for example, by failing to provide adequate summer school and not modifying a computer for his use, his mother said.
But district officials maintain they're meeting Max's needs and don't understand why his mother decided to protest.
"We really have been doing everything possible to accommodate this child," Fleck said.
In February, the Lesneskis and the district reached a 13-point agreement for Max's education. In it, the district agreed to provide "asthma treatment" and to "make reasonable efforts to ensure that an aide who is proficient in signing is with Max."
In March, the Lesneskis took the district to federal court, claiming it had violated the agreement. The couple wanted a judge to order the district to implement the agreement. The parties met with U.S. District Judge Robert Cindrich, but Cindrich never issued an order against the district, Makel said.
Lesneski said school officials told her they had no immediate plans to have her arrested but wouldn't let her retake her seat if she left the flagpole for any reason. She said she would fend off nature's urges by abstaining from food and drink. Meanwhile, she said her attorney, Peter Suwak, today planned to present school officials with a proposal for resolving the dispute.
Other McGuffey students with Down syndrome are educated outside of the district, but Lesneski said she wants Max to attend classes in his home district, where she and Max's four older siblings went to school.
Lesneski said she saw Max at the end of the school day, as he headed home to his dad, siblings and in-home attendant.
"He was on the bus, waving," Lesneski said. "He looked sad."
|
||||||||||||
