Graduation: Our Weird Other Family Part 2

  There are segments of the Special Needs universe which, even for the field, are more specific and isolated.  These segments have their own cultures, their own worries, their own woes, and while they may feel every other thing that you’ve read about thusfar regarding paraprofessionals, they or you may not be fully aware of intricate little concerns and thoughts.  This example is one that relates to students and teachers in a school setting, becoming more defined around transition age.

  When you think of the word “graduation”, it is generally considered a positive event.  There’s a long, boring ceremony, friends and family gather to watch, there’s some applause, some cake, and maybe a really important piece of paper that you’ll eventually hang up against your office wall like it was somehow worth the cost of tuition.  In our field, the definition is somewhere between a finely polished turd, and a sarcastic remark about society.
  In our field, there are two distinct definitions of graduation.  The first is that due to reasons outside of the student’s or teachers’ control, this person is going to be relocated to a new program, with new staff, a new class, and often a lot of transitional mess.  It can be as small of a move as into another classroom in the same building, and as big of a move as to a brand new school, and/or living situation.  It’s a chance for a school to show parents and family members that they are still involved in their child’s life, and in the very same way that junior high schools hold graduations, is more or less for show than actual accomplishment.
  Then there’s the Big “G” Graduation.  Where the best comparison for the other kind of small “g” graduation is junior high school, there isn’t a decent comparison for Big “G”.

  Wait a second, let me put this space here to dramatize this.  This is where the real blog post begins.  Like, right…   now…

High School Graduation is sort of an achievement, sort of a tradition.  It fits the role of acting as a celebration to help the average high schooler adjust to the idea of adulthood- whatever that means at 18 years of age.  Then, College Graduation is more of an achievement, where you celebrate the end of the accrual of your student bills, drink alcohol, and transition to the idea that you’re gonna be moving into your parents’ basement and looking for a job on Monster.com.  While both are a sort of “farewell”, they are more like…  a rite of passage.  You go from boy/girl-child, playing with toy spears, hunting pretend mammoths, to the fully grown wo/man, with a real spear, hunting real mammoths (on World of Warcraft with the money you make after taxes).
  What I’m saying is, the emphasis of a Big “G” in a typically programmed High School or College is to benefit the student, to welcome them into adulthood, and to remind everyone in attendance that they are no longer the school’s problem.

   Big “G” in OUR field might as well stand for Goodbye Funding.  It happens the day before the student’s 22^nd birthday, and marks the occasion where the amount of money allocated to make sure that any child, no matter what race, or religion, or ability level, can go to school magically disappears.  It’s a celebration to mask that while special education is relatively (RELATIVELY) well-funded from ages 0 to 21, anyone 22+ has to deal with a mish-mash conglomerate of organizations that are all exceptionally under-funded, have no media presence, and live in a virtual ‘wild west’ of laws.  With a party hat and some streamers, we bring in a cake to introduce our friends/students to the world’s Big “G” Go Fuck Yourself, and Go Figure It Out, where they leave our care, where we spent all day, every day, trying to get them to learn, grow, achieve, and find joy…  Into the hands of a notoriously small number of group homes and day programs, many of which only serve people who can be successful in 1/10 and 1/15 ratios, where even those programs have waiting lists, and cost a pretty penny to enter into.  AND, if they don’t like the student, for whatever reason, they may just drop service for them.
  “Graduation”, for us, is the soft spot in our chest that gets number and number as we watch students leave, knowing that once they leave our organization, we may never see them or hear from them ever again.  It’s the Big “G” Gone feeling that you have to get used to if you want to survive more than a few years being a paraprofessional.  It’s the Big “G” Gulp at the end of the day where you take your poison back at your apartment, and stop wanting to think or talk about work.

  I’m not saying that people shouldn’t throw Graduation parties, or whatnot, or celebrate the memory of the student.  But I mean, even the way that sounds…  “Celebrating the memory of the student”…  It feels like putting the fun into funeral.  I guess what I’m getting at is that if you know someone who works in the field, and after a Graduation they don’t want to do anything, it’s not because they’re all tuckered out from the party.

  The one thing I CAN say, however, is since our students tend to have small class sizes, at least the commencement stuff is really quick.  I mean, seriously, waiting two hours for a list of names to be rattled off by some old guy that you met maybe once…  Forget that.  So, I guess there’s at least that.