By Ann von Dehsen, June 4, 2020 — I was a teacher for a while, Special Ed teacher, and we used to have conferences with the parents over the services the kids were entitled to. The White families would come in with all their information and often they would hire an advocate to fight for the rights they thought their kid needed; they thought they needed more speech [therapy], they wanted a longer summer program, or they wanted the district to pay for activities in the summer like horseback riding and things and they would usually get those privileges. And then our Black families, this was in Delaware County, were mainly from Chester, living in poverty and they would come to these meetings obviously very, very nervous and frightened of us and sit there very quietly saying, “Okay. Okay,” and never voicing that maybe they needed more than what they were getting. And a speech therapist and I often spoke up to our supervisor and saying, “This child needs more therapies.” After a while with the dialogue, they began to get more therapies, but once our supervisor called us in after a meeting and said, “You have to stop suggesting these extra therapies. It’s very expensive. It’s not in our budget and these people should educate themselves on what’s out there.” So how do you educate yourself on what’s out there when you don’t know and you’re living in Chester, you know? So that was huge to me too. I’ve just been trying to think of those types of stories.
