Paolo attended preschool and now goes to elementary school, but standard classroom teaching isn't enough for him. He needs a special-education teacher at his side because of permanent effects from a serious congenital condition.
Children like Paolo should count themselves fortunate in Italy: they have the right to attend school with their non-disabled peers. In other countries, I understand, the law is different — segregated schools for children with disabilities.
This alone makes a real difference. It means Paolo grows up alongside his classmates, not apart from them.
His public school has embraced a recovery program for children with learning difficulties, and his special-education teacher knows it well and applies it skillfully. The municipal aide, too, plays an active role — she knows the program and brings genuine care to the work.
Still, problems persist.
Not every teacher fully implements the method within the regular curriculum. Some lean too heavily on the special-education teacher's presence, as if to say: this is your job, not mine. Then there are the bureaucratic headaches we face constantly: too few hours of support relative to the school day, computer access, the uncertainty of what each new year will bring, field trips, and on and on.
But one thing has been extraordinary for my son: his friendships with classmates.
The teachers — and I think the families too — have done something remarkable. Paolo's classmates clearly care about him. They help him when he needs it. They scold him when he deserves it. They treat him with complete naturalness because they know him well. In other words, he's simply one of them — one of them who sometimes needs an extra look, but that look carries no pity, no condescension. Only affection.
Here, I think, lies the great loss that awaits Paolo. As the children grow, the gap between them will widen. Their paths will diverge.
It shouldn't be this way. Paolo and children like him deserve not only an integrated school life, but an integrated social life — now and as adults.
Perhaps the school's example, for all its struggles, could teach us something useful. Perhaps it could become a kind of laboratory, a place where we learn strategies we might carry into the wider world — strategies for breaking down the barriers that keep disabled people isolated and excluded from ordinary life.
Gianna Maria, 2005
