A high school in Texas has a big problem with their yearbooks. Someone decided to add the label of “mentally retarded” to the photos of several students who had disabilities. The yearbooks have been collected and are going back to the printer, but, this is not enough for the parents of some the students who were affected by this situation.
There is something special about a high school yearbook. Teenagers look forward to receiving their yearbook. They excitedly pass them around, and sign the yearbooks of their friends. Imagine how upsetting it would be to open your high school yearbook and see that someone has labeled you as being “mentally retarded”. How would you feel if your child was the one who had this particular label attached to his or her yearbook photo?
Mesquite High School is located in Texas. The school recently started handing out copies of the current yearbook to students. Not long afterwards, the school needed to collect those copies, and send them back to the printer. The yearbooks contained something controversial that upset several parents.
The school has a yearbook staff that is made up of a team of students who are seniors and a teacher who acts as an advisor. Someone who was involved with the yearbook decided to put together a two-page section that featured students who were in the Special Education program.
Part of the section read: “Some of the disabilities the students in the Special Education Program have are being blind, deaf, or non-verbal”. Each student in the featured section was labeled with specific disabilities. Some were labeled as both blind and deaf, as well as “mentally retarded”.
The parents of the students in the featured section were not asked for permission to label their child this way in the school’s yearbook. In fact, they weren’t even notified about it until after the yearbooks were published and distributed.
There has been a push to end the use of “The R-word”. In California, efforts are being made to completely remove the phrase “mentally retarded” from legislation and replace it with either “intellectual disability” or “a person with an intellectual disability”. This is being done because the phrase “mentally retarded” is not medically accurate, and also because the phrase is commonly used in a derogatory manner.
The school has made the excuse that a student made the decision to feature the students who were in Special Education, and to add the labels. The school is trying to say that the purpose was to make the students feel included. The school district is planning to require staff who work on the yearbook to undergo additional training.
Image by Calsidyrose on Flickr