My Concert Weepies
Last night, I sat in a crowded theater full of cheering parents and likewise cheered my kid, who was singing in the 2nd grade chorus concert. Sprout was the wiggliest wildest audience member, along with her BFF, whose parents we got to meet finally for the first time last night. I found myself going back and forth between exasperation at my hyperactive almost-five-year-old Sprout, and being super emotional.
Why was I emotional at a 2nd grade chorus concert? Two reasons:
1) As always, I love my school district, which still invests in music education and the arts. A boatload of 7-8 year olds were up there singing and dancing, and they were clearly (mostly) having a great time. And you know what? They were actually GOOD. The last song they performed was a compilation of 90s hits that made every parent there grin and applaud, and those kids knew every movement and word to the long compilation. That music teacher put a whole lot of time and energy and enthusiasm into those kids.
Arts education matters. Thank you school district for getting that even in this age of restricted budgets and cuts in the arts.
2) More importantly, I was watching my kid sing and dance along with all the confidence in the world. She also exhibited compassion, when a friend from her class got scared and started to cry. It was my kid who insistently waved her hand and flagged down the teacher to help her crying friend. That took courage in front of a theater full of parents!
We ended the concert evening with ice cream, and for the second day in a row, Sunny got to choose the food. She selected chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. Yum.
Her Teacher Cried, Too
She’d selected her dinner the night before (spicy wings!) too, because for the first time ever she had managed to read a sentence on her own at school. She came home and proudly announced that fact to me on Wednesday, then followed it up with a question:
“My teacher cried so much Mommy. I don’t understand. Why did my teacher cry?”
As I noted in a proud Facebook post, her teacher probably cried because at the start of this school year, she was assigned a downtrodden kid who hated school and who had been given up on by every school district and teacher she’d ever had. And now she’s reading.
It just so happens we had her CSE (Committee on Special Education) meeting yesterday morning, also. It consisted of her physical, speech, and occupational therapists, her teacher, the school psychologist, the director of the special ed program, Sunny’s case worker, and my husband and me as the foster parents.
Every single person raved about Sunny. They all talked about how cheerful and cooperative she is, and about how very hard she works. All that hard work has paid off, clearly! She started the year defeated and with no self confidence, knowing a couple of letters and the numbers 1-5, and thoroughly believing she’s too dumb to learn. Now she’s doing subtraction and addition, knows the letters and their sounds, knows some sight words, and is actively sounding out words. For a kid with an intellectual disability and for whom English is a second (maybe arguably third) language? That’s nothing short of incredible.
It’s a tribute to an educational team that has endless faith in their kids, and isn’t deterred by hard work. In fact, the speech therapist noted that she’s been “stealing” Sunny to work with her whenever she has a spare minute all year just because she likes her so much, even though she wasn’t officially assigned to work with her until recently. That blew me away. I guarantee the speech therapist has more than enough other work to do!
I can’t believe I have the same kid I had when she came to us 9 months ago. She’s grown so much. Having a cadre of people cheering her on and believing in her has transformed this kid. She still has struggles with self confidence, particularly around her appearance, and we’re working on that in therapy and just generally. But overall, the change feels nothing short of miraculous. I’m just so proud of her!
What’s next for her? Well, the district has done the testing on Sunny that will qualify her for additional services for folks with intellectual disabilities through the OPWDD, or Office of People with Developmental Disabilities. Contacting them is first on my day’s agenda. Second on my day’s agenda is to contact the school board president. I’ve been invited by a neighbor to find out more about serving on the school board. I’m curious about it. I don’t know whether I really have the bandwidth for it, but given how much I adore this school district, I don’t object to the idea of being part of keeping it awesome.
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