On this year’s International Day of People with Disability, I want to share with you our story of fighting for equal access for my son at his local public school, and the improvements to access modification processes needed to ensure that this never happens to another family. I am worried that by sharing my story so openly I could alienate our family, embarrass people involved or make them look bad. I promise you that this isn’t my intention. I firmly believe that I’m telling a story that’s unfinished and importantly all of the people involved have the ability to write the following chapters.
I want to start by introducing you to my incredible 8-year old son Monty, the details of his rare disease and medical history are not important to this story but you should know that he requires a walking frame and a wheelchair to get around. Monty attends our local public school along with his older brother and sister.
Throughout 2019, every Tuesday was library day, and on those days Monty had to be carried up two flights of stairs to the second level of the school building where the library, his favourite place is. I had to finish work early as well to be there to carry him back down.
How did it come to this? Monty had already been at school for over a year by this stage and despite the efforts of our school principal and teachers to raise the modification need, nothing was coming back from the Department. The most frustrating part of this was that during this time it had been made clear to me that the Department staff involved in my issue don’t engage with families.
It is incredibly painful see your child being left behind. It’s also a feeling of helplessness, being unable to provide the things they need to be happy. Monty was only 7 at the time but it wasn’t the first time in his life he had been discriminated against, and so with those prior scars there was no way I could let this go.
I started with getting in touch with relevant advocacy bodies, one was a great listener but could only help as far as giving me the publicly listed phone number of the Education Department, while the other told me that they were unable to help individuals because their sole focus is on advocating for policy change.
Things were getting desperate, weeks were going by and Monty was also getting bigger. By this time the school was in a pretty difficult position of supporting us while managing the department process breakdown outside of their control. I was so desperate I even committed one of the biggest social faux pas which is to hassle a celebrity (Dylan Alcott) at the airport lounge and unload my son’s story on him (he and his brother were amazing and incredibly generous with their time).
Sometimes you get lucky and things line up just right. I came across two important and timely pieces of information:
- First, the Secretary for the Department of Education, Mark Scott, has a lot of LinkedIn connections.
- Second, a NSW state parliamentary event on education inclusion was going to happen in a few weeks, to be attended by the Education minister, multiple stakeholders, and open to the public.
Without knowing just how important hitting the “accept” button was going to be for me I was really glad Mark Scott connected. This gave me enough to tell the school to pass onto the department that I now had the Secretary’s contact details (technically true) and really needed that meeting now. Sure enough within a day I had a phone call from a person who I imagined had avoided talking to me for a long time, asking for a meeting time with the Department, and also people from School Infrastructure (the department responsible for school building projects).
When we had the meeting we talked about the access issues, difficulties in changing old buildings, and also options to get Monty to the second floor safely and equally. This is where the parliamentary event came into play because I now had a meeting (again technically true) with the Education Minister coming up. Sure enough, a project plan and budget were quickly put in place to get a lift installed, including an interim second ground floor junior library space while the project was being built.
I felt quite clever and proud of my achievement only for about 5 minutes, because the very next thought was just how much I did not want to see another family have to go through what we had. I resolved to attend the parliamentary event and would find a way to actually meet the Education Minister Sarah Mitchell to tell her this very story I’m now telling you. The event was amazing, I felt lucky to be there to see Al’s Story and to meet his amazing family, and to also hear from incredible advocates that I really admire like Catia Panetta. The Education Minister and I did speak that evening, and to her credit she listened and followed up with the Disability Strategy Implementation team within the department who then met and spoke to me on numerous occasions to get my story and feedback.
I can tell you that since meeting with the Education Minister I have now:
- Met with the Disability Strategy Implementation team multiple times.
- Helped the Department by inviting them to our home and school and sharing Monty’s story on film.
- Allowed our story to be used as a case study.
- Participated in public consultation groups.
- Met with representatives from school infrastructure.
So if you’ve read this far you might be wondering, what more do you want? A lift is about to go in at our school, I’ve been heard by people in the system and in government, what else is there?
The answer is that I’m not just hoping to change people’s minds or to get something off my chest, I want to see evidence of process change, something written and implemented in the system so that this doesn’t happen again. At the time of writing this I have been advised by School Infrastructure NSW that they had made recommendations to the Education Department about how the process could be improved, I’m now waiting to hear back from the Education Department on any demonstrable changes they made to this incidence of process failure.
This is the part of the story that is yet to be written. I’m hoping that the people in this story will be responsible for writing the next chapter where they’ve taken action to make process improvements and systemic changes.
If you work at the Department of Education or School Infrastructure NSW, I encourage you to think about your place in the organisation, and how your position impacts on the inclusion of people with disability. The All Means All website has some great resources to help you to gain a much more comprehensive view of issues relating to disability inclusion in education. Everything I’ve talked about here relates to just the issue of access modification, there are many more individual stories out there.
Finally I’m going to leave you with the video about Monty, his school and our family that I mentioned earlier. It was hard to say yes to making this video, because as you’ll see there is no mention of anyone having to carry Monty up and down the stairs. But this video is also important to me because it highlights the amazing administration, teachers, and students at Monty’s school, who have all done a great job in supporting Monty to have the same equal education to his peers. It’s ok to share the good and the bad. We should celebrate the good things while having the courage to own up to our failures and doing our best to fix them.
