by Andrea White
Soon the children were gathered on the rug with their teachers. Thomas was on one side of the group, Danielle on the other. Both were high in their wheelchairs, Rappaport noticed, when they should have been down on the floor, but she didn’t say anything about it. The other adults were standing behind the children, separated from them by a bookcase. That message was wrong, too, Rappaport noted later, but she didn’t say anything about that, either.
Blank, the head teacher in Classroom 506, sat on a low chair at the front of the group. “Valente was sick,’’ she said, explaining in simple language what a seizure disorder was and that Valente had died. “Some of you are going to feel different kinds of feelings,’’ she continued. “Whatever you are feeling is O.K.’’
Taylor crawled into Blank’s lap and began to cry.
Rappaport patrolled her building all day, burdened by new knowledge. “This is one thing I had never thought of,’’ she said. “That you bring in this new group and medically they are much more fragile. I thought about this program in terms of the mechanics: where do you seat the child, how do you toilet the child, how do you feed them? But I never thought about losing them.’’
That night, when they were alone at bedtime, Lora talked to Thomas. “Do you know about Valente?’’ Thomas looked up to say yes. “Where is she?’’ Thomas looked way up, past yes, toward heaven, a concept he learned a year earlier, back when Richard lost both parents within three weeks.
“‘Valente had a sickness called seizures, and you don’t,’’ Lora said. “Are you scared?’’ she asked. Thomas said yes.
VII. Making Plans
Each year, the kindergarten teachers at the Manhattan School for Children choose a theme and build the curriculum around it. When Thomas was in kindergarten, the theme was bread. From late fall through early summer the students read stories about baking it, did math lessons about buying it, visited a local bakery on a field trip and even performed an adaptation of “The Little Red Hen,’’ who bakes a loaf herself when none of her fellow farm animals will help. Thomas played a duck. His Tech/Talk was programmed to say “Quack, quack, quack.’’
At the end of the school year, all four kindergarten classes at M.S.C., those with children in wheelchairs and those without, created a bakery of their own. For two weeks beforehand, they baked – banana bread, pumpkin bread, chocolate-chip cookies, chocolate cake, cupcakes, cinnamon rolls – then stored their goods in a freezer. They drew a big sign that said “Madison Square Bakery’’ and smaller ones that priced the items at multiples of 10 cents each. They spent arts-and-crafts time making placemats and baker’s hats and vases with paper flowers.
As the “customers’’ – the parents – arrived, Thomas was positioned right at the classroom door, near the muffins. His love-hate relationship with his Tech/Talk was pure love that day, and he grinned at anyone close enough to hear him. If you were just out of range, he gestured wildly until you came near.
“Can I help you?’’ he said. “We made that fresh. It costs 10 cents. Thanks for coming.’’ Barr, his special-ed teacher, had programmed the device, and it was two of his classmates whose voices actually spoke the words, but from the expression of joy on his face, the words seemed to come from deep inside Thomas.
By the time the Ellensons arrived, there was already a crowd. “Can I help you?’’ Thomas asked them. Richard began to cry.
The end of the year was the usual blur. Richard Ellenson was elected president of M.S.C.’s parents association. Thomas, who was eager to get to his sign-in book every morning, could now write his name legibly and boldly in crayon. He also gained new mastery of the computer. One of his last projects was an alphabet book filled with animals, and he made it clear that he wanted to sound out the spellings of the words, just like the other children, rather than choose words from a prefabricated list. “Q IS FOR QUJAXL’’ he typed under a photograph of a quail. “R IS FOR RA!EBBIT.’’ “S IS FOR SKUFNK.’’ Barr was gleeful. “That’s the way a kindergartener should be writing,’’ she said.
At an end-of-year meeting, Ellenson and the M.S.C. staff members found themselves talking about the same things they were talking about at the beginning of the year. But now they spoke like veterans, not first-timers. Ellenson expressed his frustration that there still was nothing tangible – no booklet, no instructions – to hand down to others who might want to start a similar program. Wernikoff offered more support – more money, more staff development – for the coming year and told Ellenson that the school district would in fact reimburse him for the $15,000 he spent from his own pocket. Rappaport said she was determined to find a low-to-the-ground chair that would facilitate Thomas’s use of his hands.
For the coming school year, they agreed, there would again be two MotorVation classes in kindergarten, each with four disabled students. Rappaport knew she could fill those eight slots, because word was out and parents were inquiring. In the first grade, Thomas’s grade, there would be only one MotorVation class, taught by Barr and Blank. It would include the motor-impaired children who attended the first year, along with 14 nonimpaired children. All summer the parents of Thomas’s kindergarten classmates waited to learn which of their children would be allowed to move up with him into what was now considered a very desirable class. Thomas Ellenson will start first grade tomorrow morning, in Classroom 406, down on the first-grade floor. He is excited because his best friend, Evan, will be there too.
Notes
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the following for permission to reprint pieces from the copyrighted material listed below. Quotations are cited using the abbreviations listed before each work.
BD: The Blitz, The Story of December 29, 1940, Margaret Gaskin (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2005)
FW: Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill, Gretchen Craft Rubin (New York: The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group, 2003)
MEL: My Early Life 1874 – 1904, Winston Churchill (New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1996) Copyright Winston S. Churchill, 1930 & 1958 Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Ltd., London, on behalf of The Estate of Winston Churchill.
Also, reprinted with permission of Scribner, imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from My Early Life: A Roving Commission, 1930.
NGI: Never Give In: The Extraordinary Character of Winston Churchill, Stephen
Mansfield (Nashville, TN: Cumberland House Publishing, Inc., 1996)
WC: Winston Churchill, John Keegan (New York: The Penguin Group Inc., 2002)
GB: Winston Churchill: The Greatest Briton, Dominique Enright (London: Michael O’Mara Books Limited, 2003
Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Ltd., London, on behalf of The Estate of Winston Churchill
SC: Winston Churchill: Statesman of the Century, Robin H. Neillands (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2003)
LLA: Winston Spencer Churchill - The Last Lion Alone, 1932 – 1940, William Manchester (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1989)
LLV: Winston Spencer Churchill - The Last Lion, Visions of Glory, 1874 – 1931, William Manchester (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1989)
WW: The Wit & Wisdom of Winston Churchill - A Treasury of More Than 1,000 Quotations and Anecdotes, James C. Humes (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994)
WBE: World Book Encyclopedia, Vol. 3 C-Ch (Chicago: World Book Inc., 2001)
1. GB, p.10
2. MEL, p.3
3. LLV, p.127
4. MEL, p.5
5. GB, p.187
6. GB, p.57
7. MEL, p.37
8. MEL, p.37
9. MEL, p.37
10. LLA, p.677
11. MEL, p.11
12. MEL, p.13
13. GB, p.62
14. NGI, p.142
15. GB, p.184
16. MEL, p.272
17. GB, p.184
18. GB, p.184
19. WW, p.121
20. LLV, p.581
21. NGI, p.107
22. NGI, p.108
23. MEL, p.28
24. LLV, p.286
25. WW, p.91
26. WW, p.45
27. WW, p.29
28. WW, p.45
29. MEL, p.292
30. MEL, p.295
31. MEL, p.259
32. FW, p.232
33. MEL, p.37
34. MEL, p.5
35. GB, p.62
36. FW, p.181
37. LLA, p.677
38. GB, p.184
39. GB, p.187
About the Author
Andrea White was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but has spent most of her life in Houston, Texas. She received her undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Texas. Her first book, Surviving Antarctica, was listed on the reading lists of several states, including the Bluebonnet list. In 2006, she won the Golden Spur award given by the Texas State Reading Association for the best book by a Texas author.
In addition to writing, Ms. White serves as an active community volunteer. Partnering with the Houston Independent School District Board, she and her husband, Houston’s Mayor Bill White, have started the program Expectation Graduation to try to keep more kids in school. The Whites have three children: Will, Elena and Stephen. Stephen, the youngest, is a basketball player.
When his mother started Window Boy, Stephen had never heard of Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Britain during World War II. He also had no idea that a boy in a wheelchair could be a basketball genius. Ms. White wrote Window Boy with the hope that it will help middle schoolers everywhere to understand that sports heroes come in many packages, and, more importantly, that it will inspire them to learn more about Winston Churchill–an unloved son, a poor student and a mischief maker who, despite what many people said about him, became one of the greatest men in the world.
The text of Window Boy is set in Garamond, a typeface attributed to Claude Garamond, who is considered the first independent typefounder. Although he did not invent movable type, he was the first to make type available to printers at an affordable price. In 1541 Garamond was commissioned by François I to cut a sequence of Greek fonts known as the grecs du roi. Modern typefaces bearing the Garamond name are not always based on these designs, but they share certain characteristics of timeless beauty and readability.
