In 2013 HCDE educators and administrators made a public pronouncement in federal court (L.H. v Hamilton County Dept. of Ed.) that educating my son, Luka Hyde, was “futile” since Luka has Down syndrome.
He had been attending Normal Park for four years where he had made consistent progress, but the principal had been repelling students with disabilities for the last five years.
Luka has been at The Montessori School of Chattanooga for the last six years and is now in the eighth grade. Luka just took the NWEA MAP Growth exam against the eighth-grade standards. He received allowable accommodations and no modifications. Luka scored “low-average” in mathematics and “low” in reading/reading comprehension. Those are quite acceptable results for a student with Down syndrome who still has more than three months remaining in the eighth-grade curriculum. In fact, his test results are comparable to most nondisabled eighth-grade students attending Hamilton County public schools.
In our case three judges on the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it was HCDE teachers and administrators who were “unable and unwilling” to provide Luka with an appropriate education – a fault of the educators, not the fault of the student. The lesson: Presume competence!
Deborah Rausch
Luka Hyde’s mother
Discrimination has no place in TFP
Why are you featuring white supremacists in your newspaper? It is understandable and fair to highlight reader opinions from varying ends of the political spectrum; however, to give a person who holds glaringly and undeniably racist viewpoints a platform from which to spew hateful rhetoric like “a community becoming whiter is a good thing” (in Monday’s Letters to the Editor, “Vision for city, county future is a big stretch) and to perpetuate the harmful stereotyping and discrimination against people of color is disgraceful.
I enjoy reading the Times Free Press daily, but today I have found myself disappointed and, frankly, revolted.
Michelle DuBose
Ooltewah
Rid cemeteries of evil war dead
Please help to restore all honor to America’s veteran cemeteries, including Chattanooga and Arlington. Being a Vietnam vet, I find it appalling our government has turned a blind eye to the evil of Nazis and Italian atrocities and crimes of the Holocaust to let those remains lie in our great fields of honor.
Those remains must be exhumed and repatriated. I am asking Americans of conscience and faith to join me in petitioning President Trump for an executive order to remove those bodies from America’s hallowed and holy grounds; that, in turn, dedicates the land to those deserving its deep respect for sacrificing their lives for the sake of freedom.
These consecrated and sacred grounds are to hold and keep and honor the United States of America’s brave warriors, not the enemies of the world.
Robert C. Heathington Jr.