When Michele Pierce was in the third grade in Newcastle, Maine, her teacher grew weary of dealing with her constant disruptions and drifting attention span and moved her desk into a giant, five-sided cardboard box.
It was 1974, and the box was a fitting metaphor for the state of special education at the time. Children like Pierce, who had severe dyslexia and a laundry list of other learning disabilities, were at the mercy of the instructional whims of their teachers and the often-feeble special education infrastructures of their districts.
“That was their way of dealing with me,” recalled Pierce, sitting in the living room of the Claremont home she shares with her grandson, Deegan, an aging pit bull, six rabbits and a noisy lovebird.
Deegan now is just about the age Pierce was when she was sequestered from her classmates by cardboard walls, and in many ways, his experiences could not be more different from his grandmother’s. Educators understand his needs far better than the educators of generations ago and are mandated to provide him the services he needs in the least restrictive way possible.
In other ways, his story reads the same as his mother’s and grandmother’s: a story of disadvantaged beginnings, misunderstood behavior and frustrating outcomes.
“I just feel like there’s so much that could have been different for all of us,” Pierce said.
Three years ago, as Pierce’s grandson entered the same school system where her daughter turned to a life of delinquency, she decided she wanted to make things different. She ran for a seat on the Claremont School Board and – to her surprise – won. Now, as the board considers a proposal to bring some out-of-district special education placements back into the district, Pierce is cautiously hopeful about the future.
“I want to see the children come back to Claremont,” she said.
Pierce, 52, was born in Maine and spent her early years in Norfolk, Va., in what she describes as a chaotic household run by a stern father and an abusive, alcoholic mother. It was the kind of home where everyone just stepped over the cat feces on the floor, she said. Pierce and her younger brother got their clothes from church basements and wore bread bags on their feet in rainy weather. When she was 8, her parents split up, and her mother moved back to Maine with her and her brother. Her mother gave birth to another child, who, Pierce said, she was unfit to care for. Raising her half brother fell mostly to her.
At the same time, Pierce was miserable in school. The other kids teased her for her shabby clothes and poor grades. Along with dyslexia, she had processing disorders that made some of her classes feel like torture. She couldn’t sit still and couldn’t find her way through complicated math problems or multistep processes. “The teachers would get wildly, insanely frustrated with me,” she said.
The year after she was relegated to a box, Pierce’s special education teachers began pulling her out of her regular classroom for several of her classes, a practice that continued through most of her school career.
“You would sit and stare at your classmates across the hall,” she recalled. “I struggled horribly through school.”
There were a few bright spots. One of Pierce’s high school special education teachers became a mentor and role model, encouraging her to stay strong amid adversity.
“She told me to be like a duck and let things roll off my back,” Pierce said.
In her senior year, Pierce was able to attend a tech center in Bath, Maine, where she earned her CNA certificate. A few years later, she said, she became the first female graduate of a welding program at Bath Iron Works. The years that followed were filled with ups and downs, steps forward and steps backward. Pierce got a job, got her own apartment, lost her apartment, moved back home, reunited with an old boyfriend, moved back out, and, in 1987, gave birth to a daughter, Dwan Russell.
When Dwan was 2 years old, her father, Pierce’s fiance, was on his way to his part-time job in the shoe department at Kmart when he was killed in a car accident during a fluke April snowstorm – just a few months after his brother also was killed in a car accident. Later that year, Pierce was injured seriously in a head-on crash with a teenage driver, and the following spring, her mother was killed in a head-on collision.
Pierce can’t precisely explain why, several years later, she walked away from the relatively stable life she’d made for herself – a husband, a house she’d bought with some settlement money from her car accident, a good job in the human resources department of a nursing home – but she thinks the memories of those tragic events had something to do with it.
“Nothing felt right,” she said. “Everywhere I drove was a memory.”
Pierce said she’d visited Claremont at Christmastime one year and fell in love with the city. In 2001, just before Dwan’s freshman year in high school, Pierce packed up their things and moved here on a whim.
Nearly 20 years later, Pierce still loves her adopted home. But she wonders if things would have turned out differently for Dwan if she’d never come here.
“Moving to New Hampshire at the time was the worst thing I could have done,” she said.
Late in the afternoon a week before Christmas, a clatter in the kitchen alerted Pierce that Deegan was home, and a moment later the red-headed 8-year-old appeared in the living room, holding a laminated construction paper gingerbread house and a note, which Pierce read aloud:
“Deegan had an OK day. He made a lot of noise … he was being disruptive.”
Pierce paused and looked at her grandson. “Can you tell me why you were disruptive?”
“Nene, I don’t know. I was bored,” the boy replied, his tone acquiring a hard edge.
Pierce came up with the name “Nene” when Deegan was born because she didn’t feel old enough to be “Grandma.” As it turned out, the traditional grandparent role never fit either.
Like her mother, Dwan had trouble in school, and the older she got, the worse it got. At Stevens High School, she was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD and developed behavior problems that Pierce said the school was not equipped to deal with. She started using drugs and skipping school, and Pierce regularly got phone calls at work explaining that her daughter had gone missing again.
Eventually, Dwan’s special education team resorted to an out-of-district placement – an option that’s now employed for about 2.7 percent of students statewide and about 5.6 percent of students in Claremont. She began attending the Contoocook School, a small-group program near Concord for young people with specific learning disabilities and emotional needs. While there were some benefits to the intensive instruction and therapy provided there, Pierce said, the experience took its toll.
“I wanted her to be able to stay in school and do things with her peers,” she said.
Along with feelings of failure and isolation, Pierce and her daughter struggled with the logistics of the out-of-district solution in the days before the district provided transportation services to these facilities. “We had to drive there every day, back and forth,” said Pierce, who received a stipend from the district for the task but found it difficult to keep a job during those years.
In her senior year, Dwan was able to return to Stevens High School and graduate – just barely. But she never found the stable footing that Pierce had managed to find after high school. Now living in Maine, she recently completed a jail sentence for drug-related charges and is struggling to stay sober.
Deegan, born when Dwan Russell was 23, bounced from place to place during his first few years of life, finally landing permanently with Pierce when he was about 18 months old, according to Pierce (Russell says he was closer to 3). Pierce has had full-time custody ever since.
It’s impossible to know how much her daughter’s high school experiences influenced this trajectory, but Pierce can’t help wondering if things could have been different.
“I definitely believe that she could have gotten a better education if she wasn’t sent out everywhere,” she said.
Russell, reached at the group home where she lives in Portland, Maine, disagreed.
“I was out of control,” she said. “When a student is that uncooperative, there’s nothing you can do.”
And while Pierce said the teachers and administrators could have done much more to keep her daughter out of trouble and help her succeed, Russell voiced mostly positive feelings toward the people who worked with her in Claremont.
“The teachers pulled for me, and I think they responded in an appropriate way,” she said. “The teachers in special ed I feel are so understanding. They sit down and take the time to work with these troubled teens.”
So far, Pierce said, things are better for Deegan, a second-grader at Bluff Elementary School, than they were for Dwan. His teacher utilizes a little booklet in which she writes notes home for Pierce every day describing his behavior.
Based on the summary, Pierce awards or withholds privileges such as playing video games. She likes this method and also is pleased that Deegan does not suffer from learning disabilities. Diagnosed with ADHD and Oppositional Defiant Disorder and taking two prescription medications, he qualifies for a 504 plan but not an Individualized Education Plan.
On one hand, that’s a good thing, Pierce said, because it means Deegan won’t have the same struggles his mother and grandmother had. On the other hand, it means Deegan doesn’t qualify for some special education resources.
Pierce also is frustrated with what she considers outdated instructional models that require young students to sit still for extended periods of time and alarmist ways of dealing with behavioral issues. In kindergarten, she said, Deegan was put in a padded room when he got out of control. Now, when his outbursts escalate, she said, the teacher empties the classroom in order to deal with him.
Cory LeClair, assistant superintendent for the Claremont School District, said that what Pierce calls a padded room was a “safe” room: the walls were not padded but the room was empty of furniture and any other items that could be destroyed or with which the student could hurt him or herself. After state laws changed regarding disciplinary procedures, she said, the use of safe rooms was discontinued in the district. In the case of severe behavioral problems, the teachers sometimes have no choice but to remove the other students from the room, she said.
“Our first priority is to keep children safe, and if we have a child who is posing a threat to themselves or others … we will evacuate the other children out of the classroom because that child has disrupted the learning environment and the other children are no longer safe,” LeClair said.
Pierce, who now lives on disability assistance after having both knees replaced, also worries about Deegan’s future. She hopes his behavioral issues won’t intensify to the point that he’ll need to receive instruction beyond his regular classroom, but if they do, she wants him and other children like him to be able to stay in Claremont. As both a grandparent and a member of the School Board, she supports a proposal embedded in this year’s operating budget – presented at a public hearing earlier this month – to create an in-house alternative special education program for students with serious behavioral issues.
“If it means that my grandson can have a better education by not constantly being taken out of school, then I’m for it,” she said.
Severe behavioral issues are among the most difficult for school districts to handle and the primary reason that students are bused out of district. Currently about 30 of the school’s 400 special education students receive instruction at one of about a dozen out-of-district locations, traveling by bus as far as 90 minutes each way, according to Claremont Special Education Director Benjamin Nester.
The in-house proposal, which has been met with enthusiasm by school board members, would bring some of those students back into the district. The two-classroom, therapeutic environment, staffed by an administrator, a social worker, two teachers and five mental health workers, would represent a net budget increase of about $60,000 in the first year, Nester said, but would almost certainly save the district money over time.
Claremont is not alone in grappling with out-of-district placements. Other school districts in the region, including Newport and Lebanon, have similar percentages of students receiving instruction in separate schools or residential facilities, while the Kearsarge Regional, Mascoma Valley Regional and Hanover districts have numbers below the state average.
Numbers don’t tell the whole story, though. Students’ Individualized Education Plans dictate what types of services the district is required to provide them, and sometimes a school simply isn’t equipped to deal with a particular student’s needs, said Cheryl McDaniel-Thomas, director of student support services for the Newport School District, which also is exploring options for reducing out-of-district placements. Often, out-of-district placements occur when a very small percentage of students need a particular service or resource, she explained.
But no matter the rationale for sending a student out of district, it’s almost always viewed as a short-term solution, McDaniel-Thomas said. “Our responsibility is to immediately look at how we can transition that student back,” she said. “The biggest loss to kids in out-of-district placements is that they’re no longer making those connections in their peer community.”
Experts agree that keeping students within their home districts leads to better outcomes – a sense of belonging perhaps chief among them.
“It’s about an attitude that all of our kids belong in our community,” said Dan Habib, a filmmaker and project director for the University of New Hampshire Institute on Disability, who examined best practices in supporting at-risk students in his 2012 documentary Who Cares About Kelsey? “Often these kids (with behavioral issues) are judged much more quickly as the bad kids, when really they’re dealing with either neurological issues or chemical issues or maybe environmental issues in their home life that they have no control over. …We need to create an environment where they feel safe and have a pathway to success.”
In Claremont, the new proposal is one brick in a pathway that special educators have been building for a few years. Through a grant awarded by the New Hampshire Department of Education, the district has been designing and implementing what’s known as a multi-tiered system of support for the student population. Drawing on best practices in education, the multi-tiered system emphasizes sensitivity and constructive strategies in dealing with problematic behaviors.
“It’s an infrastructure that’s very values-driven. …It’s about developing positive relationships with students, engaging the students and providing individualized supports for students with significant emotional and behavioral challenges,” said JoAnne Malloy, a research associate professor at the Institute on Disability, who provides consulting services to Claremont and other school districts. “There’s been a lot of movement toward compassion.”
As part of the multi-tiered system infrastructure, the proposed in-house program has a lot of potential but is not a guaranteed home run, said Malloy, who has not been involved with the proposal herself.
“The test is in the implementation,” she said. “You have to monitor how it’s being used, that the program is doing what it was designed to do, and that it’s making progress.”
One potential drawback to such a program is that it offers a relatively easy alternative to keeping kids in their regular classrooms, said Habib, a former Concord Monitor photographer who shared his family’s own experiences with special education and inclusion in his first film, Including Samuel.
“I think it’s a wonderful thing if those students can come back to the district and be supported there,” he said. “(But) my strong belief is that every student should have an opportunity to learn alongside their peers in their regular classroom. That should really be the starting point for every student.”
Not everyone agrees with that notion. In interviews last month, some School Board members expressed support for the proposed program as a possible means of removing additional students with behavior problems from the regular classroom.
“I think we have a group of kids at the elementary level who have a hard time dealing in a typical classroom,” said Claremont School Board member Jason Benware, who emphasized that he was speaking for himself and not the board. “It’s also a distraction to the learning of everybody else. I think setting up a program like this really benefits everybody involved … over time, we’ll be able to service more of these identified kids.”
Sometimes students themselves prefer being pulled out of their classrooms too. During her senior year, Russell remembers feeling relieved when she was pulled out of regular classes for math and other subjects.
“Those classes really helped me,” she said of the classes tailored to her needs.
And it wasn’t just the extra support she received there that Russell appreciated. It was, somewhat ironically, the sense of community.
“Those other kids that were in the room with me were exactly like me. I felt so comfortable,” she said. “My mom didn’t want to see me get picked on and feel different … but what she didn’t really understand or know is that’s how I already felt.”
For Pierce, the question of pulling students out of class is a complex one, colored by her own experiences many years ago.
But what she wants most is for students to be able to stay in their schools.
“Some kids aren’t able to go to mainstream classes no matter how much you want them to,” she said. “But with so many out-of-district kids, we’re saying, ‘We can’t handle our children so we’re going to send them somewhere else.’ ”
At School Board meetings, Pierce often butts heads with other board members. She claims that some of her colleagues get frustrated with her for asking a lot of questions and not always understanding standard procedures. Sometimes she feels the same way she felt in school years ago: misunderstood. Her dealings with other board members illustrate the difficulties that people with nonvisible disabilities face every day, she said.
But Pierce’s clashes – which also extend to other arenas – are ideological as well.
At one recent School Board meeting, for example, she debated with other board members about donations to the school lunch fund that continued to trickle in following publicized reports of school lunch debt last fall. Other board members wanted to use the donations to stock school food pantries that were just installed in the schools, while Pierce wanted to bank the money toward future debt.
While other board members expressed concern that continuing to cover lunch debt amounted to “bailing people out,” Pierce said it was the responsible and compassionate thing to do.
“We live in a community of single parents, single grandparents raising children,” she said. “It’s not about paying people’s debt, it’s about catastrophic events that happen to people.”
Pierce said she knows firsthand about the tragedies that can befall people and feels it’s her duty to help others. She estimates she’s helped about 50 people in the community who are struggling with homelessness, drug addiction, lack of transportation and other difficulties.
She’s also taken it upon herself for the past several years to decorate the city center for Christmas, a practice that has led to run-ins with some city officials. (Her run-ins are unrelated to the controversy over religious holiday displays in Broad Street Park.)
Running for School Board three years ago was, like other decisions, an impulsive move on Pierce’s part as she grappled with her grandson’s future.
“I have no idea how I won,” said Pierce, whose campaign consisted of planting handmade signs around the city, and who ousted former School Board Chairman Richard Seaman. “I guess I had a lot of support that I didn’t know I had.”
Despite the difficulties she’s encountered, Pierce said she plans to run again this year (this time with glitter-embellished signs).
She wants to continue representing the large percentage of single parents and grandparents raising kids in Claremont, as well as serve as a reminder that people with disabilities can and should be included in all settings, she said.
And she wants to keep special education at the forefront of the board’s priorities.
“That is the most important thing I think we need to address,” she said.