Here’s a story that made Ellen DeGeneres’s Good News page: A senior at Arrowhead Union High School in Hartland, Wisconsin had a crush on a guy she’d gotten to be friends with on the school bus. Pretty typical, eh? The teen, Stephanie Kaye, happens to have Down syndrome. Her crush, Ed Brandenburg, heard that she had a thing for him.
Ed had never before been to prom, but asked her mom’s permission to take her. Then he approached Stephanie in the school cafeteria with a bouquet of flowers and popped the question. Everyone cheered. You can see Stephanie’s excitement in the video on Yahoo! Shine.
“She’s been asking me to homecoming over the years and I never took her offer very seriously,” he explained. “But this year I decided to make her last memory of me before I go to college special by taking her to prom…. She always has been the important one in the friendship.”
I think this is really sweet. But as a special needs parent, I also felt concerned. I don’t know anything about Stephanie’s social existence, but in the video she was sitting alone during lunchtime. Does she have a good social life? What happened after the prom? Did this guy start hanging out with her at school? Did people start sitting with her at lunch?
One-time bliss hits like this definitely make for lasting memories. And they make everyone involved feel good, too. For my son, though, I dream of more. I want peers who accept Max as he is, not just on special occasions but year round. I want him to get asked out to events not just because people feel it’s a “good” thing to do but because they genuinely want to. I know how lonely being a kid with special needs can be because I see it. My son attends a school for kids with disabilities but when we’re in social settings, like at the local park, kids ignore him unless I initiate conversation.
Kind gestures like this end up being just that: gestures, as sincere as they may be. There is no easy answer, but it starts with parents and teachers helping typically-developing kids understand when they are young that youth with special needs are, in many ways, just like them. Our kids and teens want to enjoy life as much as any others—and, yes, they’d like to go to the prom.
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From my other blog:
50 ways kids with special needs are totally typical
When special needs moms know better than the experts do
Parents magazine makes special needs history
Screen grab, Yahoo! Shine video
Image of woman wearing wrist corsage via Shutterstock