Miami-Dade Schools

Losing Help

Funding shortfall eliminates teachers for special needs kids with no place else to learn  

By Jordan Melnick    

Ryan Saavedra graduated from Felix Varela Senior High last Friday at the age of 20.

For most students, graduating two years behind the rest of their classmates would be a source of humiliation. For Saavedra, it was a triumph.

During the 2005-2006 school year, Ryan, an honor student enrolled in AP courses, was a senior playing offense, defense and special teams for the Coral Reef Senior High School football team. But during his school’s homecoming game on Sept. 30, he walked off the field complaining of nausea and told his coach, “I just got banged.” Shortly after, he collapsed on the sidelines and had to be airlifted to the Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital, where he fell into a coma that he would not awake from until his 18th birthday on Oct. 25.

Saavedra had suffered a severe brain injury. When he came out of the nearly month-long coma, he was a shadow of the athlete he had so recently been.

“A 6-foot-tall infant — that’s the best way I can describe it,” said Saavedra’s mother, Charito. “He could not hold his head up, could not sit up, could not feed himself. Literally, just like an infant.”

Saavedra spent the next four and a half months at Jackson, first in the Intensive Care Unit and eventually in the Pediatric Rehabilitation Center, before moving to Baptist Hospital of South Florida on Jan. 15.

There, Saavedra met Vivian Sueiras, the woman whom he would eventually credit with guiding him to a diploma.

Sueiras is an itinerant teacher at Merrick Educational Center, a Miami-Dade County public school that provides education to medically and cognitively challenged students throughout the county. Itinerants work with students at home or at the hospital, with the goal of guiding them back to the classroom. Doctors have deemed these students — many of whom are battling cancer or brain tumors, as well as psychological illnesses —   incapable of attending a school setting.

Saavedra had improved somewhat when Sueiras first started working with him at Baptist.

“He was walking and speaking slightly, but his awareness was not up to par,” Charito says. “He would come in and out.”

When Saavedra was able to go home, Sueiras started teaching him there twice a week, for an average of an hour per session. Her job was difficult: to get a boy who often forgot her name to complete his remaining credits so he could graduate high school.

“As a senior, Ryan had to cover government and economics,” Sueiras said. “Because of the injury, his memory is severely affected and I had to adapt the curriculum to Ryan’s abilities. It had to be what he could grasp at that moment.”

Despite all the difficulties, Sueiras got Ryan to a point where he could transition back to the classroom, and six months ago, he started taking electives at Felix Varela, while Sueiras continued to teach him his core subjects at home.

Then, last Friday, Ryan walked across the graduation stage and took his diploma. It should have happened two years earlier, but Ryan’s mother knows that if it weren’t for Sueiras it would not have happened at all.

“Oh my God — 100 percent,” Charito answers when asked how much credit Sueiras deserves. “If it hadn’t have been for her, that day would not have come.”

But after the school district eliminated 800 teaching positions countywide over the last two weeks, including six Merrick itinerants and a handful of other teachers who work at Merrick’s Coral Gables school, “that day” may not come for other Miami-Dade students with huge battles of their own.

This year, there were 22 itinerants at Merrick who each handled somewhere between 12 and 15 “profoundly handicapped” students for two to three hours a week. According to Sueiras — who, because of her seniority, did not lose her position — the reduction in itinerants will reduce the amount of time she can spend with her students.

“Right now we’re losing six itinerants, so we will only be able to see our kids once a week for maybe an hour,” she said.

Lourdes Valido, one of the itinerants “surplused” by the district, also worries about Merrick’s students.

“Some of our kids have leukemia,” she said. “They’re out of school, they have no immune system, they’re going through chemotherapy, radiation. This is not something a tutor can do. We enter the home. Without Merrick, they will get no education whatsoever.”

According to district spokesman John Schuster, the 800 teacher positions were eliminated because of an estimated $69 million cut in funding for next year.

“This is a process we go through every year,” Schuster said. “Last year, we surplused 100 teachers. But this year, because of the size of the funding cuts, the impact was so much more.”

Still, Valido does not think the district understands the full impact of cutting the Merrick program.

“The people up there don’t realize what Merrick is really all about,” she said. “They’re looking at numbers. They don’t realize there’s no place these kids can go.”

At a Monday budget meeting, many of Merrick’s staff members pleaded their cases to the five School Board members present. Ryan also spoke.

“I hope that no one in this room or their loved ones have to go through this,” he said in a slow, tremulous voice. “But if you do, rest assured that the dedicated members of the Merrick Education Center will be there to help you back to as close to a normal life as possible.”

Charito, who stood by Ryan’s side while he spoke to the silenced crowd, agrees whole-heartedly with her son. “They are the most compassionate, hardworking individuals I have ever met,” she said. “Because of them, Ryan was able to return to a school and be part of a regular curriculum. They made everything so much simpler for me during a really hard time.”

Schuster says the district will try to find new positions for the 800 surplused teachers, most of whom were taken out of schools with declining enrollment. But Valido, who is certified to teach Exceptional Student Education and has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Florida, feels that she can best serve students at Merrick.

“This is a different situation than in most schools,” she said. “It’s not like elsewhere, where you can just spread kids around the classrooms. We have to give these children a sense of normalcy.”

That is exactly what Charito says Sueiras did for her son, and it is her hope that no student ever be denied the same opportunity.

“Accidents will continue, unfortunately,” she said. “Children will continue to become ill. These children are the most fragile and need the most assistance. Ms. Sueiras came into my family and brought us as close to normal as possible. She did not just help Ryan come back to school, she helped him come back to life.”