Am I the asshole for going off on my little brother’s teacher in front of the whole class during a field trip?
I’m 17 and Darius is 9, and he has cerebral palsy – he uses a walker and needs a little extra time for stuff, but he’s sharp as hell and there’s nothing wrong with his brain. My mom works doubles on Thursdays so when the permission slip came home saying his class was going to the science museum, she asked me to be a chaperone. I said yes because Darius was so excited he literally couldn’t sleep the night before.
His teacher, Ms. Pruitt, is maybe 35 and has been teaching his class for two years. My mom has had three meetings with her about inclusion. THREE.
The bus ride was fine. Darius sat next to me and told me every single fact he knew about space. But the second we walked into the museum, Ms. Pruitt pulled me aside and said, “I was thinking Darius might be more comfortable waiting in the lobby with the other aide while the class does the upper level exhibits.” The upper level. The part with the rockets. The part Darius had been talking about for two weeks.
I asked her if the upper level was accessible. She said, “Technically, yes, but the elevator is slow and we’re on a schedule.”
I said, “So he can go.”
She said, “It would just be easier for everyone if – “
I looked at Darius. He was already watching us. He’d heard enough of it to know what was happening. His face did that thing where he goes completely still.
I told Ms. Pruitt that Darius was going to see the rockets with his class.
She said, “I’m the teacher on this trip and I’m asking you to respect that.”
My friends are split – half of them say I should have just let it go and talked to the principal after, and maybe they’re right, I don’t know. But the other half say what I did next was completely justified.
Because I didn’t let it go.
I took out my phone, opened the camera, and I looked Ms. Pruitt dead in the eye and said –
What I Said
“I’m going to record this conversation because I want to make sure I remember exactly what you told Darius’s mother about why her son wasn’t allowed to see the rockets with his class.”
Ms. Pruitt’s whole face changed.
Not guilty. Not caught. Just annoyed, like I was a gnat that had gotten too close to her coffee.
She said, “Put that away. You’re a minor on a school-supervised trip and you do not have permission to record me.”
I said, “Illinois is a one-party consent state. I’m one of the parties.”
I don’t actually know if that’s true. I’d heard it somewhere and it came out of my mouth before I could think about it. But I kept the camera up.
Behind her, the class was starting to notice. Twenty-two third-graders, two other parent chaperones, and the museum aide who’d been waiting by the elevator with a bored look that had shifted into something more interested.
Darius hadn’t moved. He was still holding his walker, still watching us, still doing that still-face thing. He does it when he’s trying to figure out if he’s about to be embarrassed. He’s been doing it since he was five. I hate that he has a face for that. I hate that he needed to develop one.
Ms. Pruitt lowered her voice. “This is not the place.”
I said, “I agree. The place for this conversation was the three meetings his mom had with you about inclusion. But since we’re here, we’re going to the upper level.”
She said, “You’re here as a volunteer. You don’t make decisions about how I run my class.”
And that’s when I stopped keeping my voice low.
The Part My Friends Are Arguing About
I wasn’t screaming. I want to be clear about that. I didn’t call her names. I didn’t swear.
But I stopped whispering, and I stopped being careful, and I said, loud enough for the kids nearby to hear: “My brother has cerebral palsy. He uses a walker. The upper level of this museum is accessible. There is an elevator. You are trying to leave him in the lobby during the part of the trip he has been looking forward to for two weeks because it would be more convenient for your schedule. That is not inclusion. That is just leaving him out and calling it something nicer.”
One of the other parent chaperones, a woman named Gail who I’d talked to on the bus, said, “Oh.”
Just that. Just oh.
Ms. Pruitt said, “I’m going to have to call the school and report this interaction.”
I said, “Okay. I’m going to call my mom.”
I called my mom.
She picked up on the second ring even though she was mid-shift, which is the thing about my mom – she always picks up for us, always, even when she shouldn’t have to. I told her in about forty-five seconds what was happening. There was a pause on her end. Then she said, “Put her on.”
I held the phone out to Ms. Pruitt.
Ms. Pruitt did not take the phone.
I said, “She wants to talk to you.”
Ms. Pruitt said, “I’m not going to have a conversation with a parent through a student.”
I put the phone back to my ear. My mom said, “Is the elevator working?” I said yes. She said, “Then Darius goes upstairs. And I want you to stay right next to him the whole time.” Then she said, “Tell Ms. Pruitt I’ll be calling the principal tonight. Not tomorrow. Tonight.”
I relayed that.
Ms. Pruitt looked at me for a long moment. Then she turned to the class and said, “Okay, everyone, we’re going to take the elevator to the upper level.”
Like that. Like she’d always planned it.
Going Up
The elevator fit about eight kids at a time, so it took three trips.
Darius and I went in the first group.
The elevator was slow. Ms. Pruitt had been right about that. It took almost two full minutes to get from the ground floor to the upper level, and the doors made a grinding noise on the way up that made two of the kids laugh. Darius counted the floor numbers out loud as they changed on the display. His voice was completely steady.
When the doors opened, the rockets were right there.
Not like, across the room and behind a railing. Right there. Full-scale models hanging from the ceiling and mounted on platforms, and the light in that room was different from the rest of the museum, kind of gold-toned and dramatic, and Darius walked out of the elevator and stopped.
He just stopped and looked up.
His mouth was open a little. He had a Saturn V fact ready – I could tell because he gets this specific expression when he’s about to deploy information – but for once it didn’t come out right away. He just looked.
There was a plaque on the wall next to the nearest model that listed the mission dates and the crew names. Darius read every word of it. He read it twice. Then he turned to me and said, “The astronauts had to train for years before they went up.”
I said, “Yeah.”
He said, “It’s worth it though. To get to go.”
I didn’t say anything.
He moved on to the next exhibit, and I followed him, and I kept my eyes very dry because I was not going to cry in the science museum at 17 years old.
After
The rest of the trip was fine. Quiet. Ms. Pruitt stayed on the other side of the room from us, which was honestly a relief. Gail, the other parent chaperone, ended up walking with Darius and me for most of the upper level. She asked him questions about the exhibits and he answered all of them with the specific energy of a kid who has been waiting his whole life for someone to ask.
On the bus home, Darius fell asleep against my shoulder about ten minutes in. He does this. He gets so excited and then crashes completely, and his whole body goes heavy and his breathing slows down and he’s just gone.
I sat there for the whole ride back trying to figure out if I’d done the right thing.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: Ms. Pruitt knew. She knew the upper level was accessible. She knew there was an elevator. She wasn’t trying to protect Darius from something actually impossible. She was trying to protect the schedule from the inconvenience of including him. And she’d made that calculation so many times, and so automatically, that she didn’t even flinch when she suggested it. She pulled me aside and said it like it was the reasonable option, like I’d obviously agree once she explained it, like of course the kid with the walker would just wait downstairs.
Three meetings. My mom has sat across a table from this woman three times.
That night, my mom called the principal. I don’t know everything that was said because she went into her bedroom and closed the door, but the call was forty minutes long. My mom came out after and made herself a cup of tea and said, “You did right.”
She doesn’t say that a lot. She’s not stingy with it, she just means it specifically when she says it, so it lands differently than when people say it all the time.
Darius was already in bed. He’d been asleep since seven.
So. Am I?
My friends who say I should have waited and gone to the principal – I get it. I do. There’s a version of this where I quietly make sure Darius gets on the elevator, and then I document everything on the bus home, and my mom makes the call, and maybe the outcome is the same or maybe it’s better because nobody feels confronted or defensive.
But here’s the thing about that version: Darius still would have heard it. He’d already heard it. He’d already done the still-face. Whatever I did after that point, he’d already been told, in a museum lobby in front of his classmates, that his presence was a scheduling problem.
I couldn’t un-ring that. None of my quiet, strategic, after-the-fact options could un-ring it.
What I could do was make sure that the next thing he heard was someone saying, out loud, that he had the right to be there. Not whispering it. Not negotiating it in a corner. Just saying it like it was obvious, because it is obvious, and the only reason it keeps needing to be said is because people like Ms. Pruitt keep acting like it isn’t.
He saw the rockets.
He read every plaque. He told Gail about the guidance computer on the Apollo missions and she actually got her phone out to look up more about it because she didn’t know and he did. On the bus he slept like he hadn’t slept in weeks, which tracks, because he really hadn’t – he’d been too excited.
He’s nine. He has years of field trips ahead of him, years of Ms. Pruitts making calculations in lobbies, years of that still-face. I can’t be there for all of it.
But I was there for this one.
—
If this one got to you, pass it along. Someone out there needs to read it.
For more tales of standing up for what’s right, or at least for what you believe is right, check out what happened when my husband’s phone was face-down on the nightstand every night, when my best friend left me her lake house, or when my husband watched me follow a stranger out of a coffee shop.
