After a 2-year battle, Krysta finally received real time captioning services at school! OMG!!

She came home and shared that she “never knew teachers told jokes in class.” It’s amazing to me and absolutely wonderful at the same time. Imagine ~ discovering at the age of 17 that your teachers are funny. It sheds light on the issues we’ve had for years of her thinking that anytime any group of people were laughing (and she hadn’t purposely been entertaining) they were laughing AT HER.

I remember back at Golden Valley at the end of that awful school year how we were still trying to get the “captionist” (not) to give Krysta access to everything that the hearing students had access to. I mean, seriously, one example of the multitude of meetings held in one year was when Krysta and I met with the district representatives and the “captionist.” Rather than me speak for her, I sat back and said, “You tell them what you told me.” Krysta proceeded to speak to the “captionist” about how she knew people were talking including the teacher, but her screen where the notes should be was blank. She turned to the woman and asked where her notes were, and Krysta got sent to the office for being a troublemaker. The woman, without batting an eyelash, explained that she was writing down the names of kids who were texting in class. WHAT? At least the district representatives all set her straight that her job was to caption and not classroom management or helping the teacher. Still, why did we have to have an hour-long conversation about what she should be typing and if she could substitute words when other students cussed. NO, you may not. If the hearing kids hear it, my kid sees it. Then it’s the teacher’s job to handle classroom management.

Anyway, the great news today is the she has CART, she is understanding the lessons, has the appropriate notes, knows about class discussions, and is happier because for better or worse, she knows what’s going on. Thank goodness!