The Real Nicole White

The Real Nicole White

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Will the Real Nicole White Please Step
Forward
by Holly White and Loretta White
From the Editor: In some ways
the perception most people have of blind, multiply disabled or deaf-blind children
is the flip side of the old adage about not being able to see the forest for
the trees. It is easy with these children to only see the myriad physical, mental,
and/or emotional manifestations of the disabilities, and to entirely miss seeing
the unique individual under all those disabilities. Sometimes it takes someone
like, well, another child maybe a sister or brother to help us see that distinctive
personality.
The following article contains two descriptions
of the same child Nicole White. Both are accurate, but neither is truly complete
without the other. One is a detailed description of Nicole's disabilities. This
information is vital to developing an appropriate education plan. But even the
best prepared plan will not work unless the teacher understands that he or she
is not teaching a conglomeration of disabilities he or she is teaching a child;
a child that a sister can play with, argue with, tease, and love. Here is
Nicole White: The Disabilities and Nicole White: The Sister.
Nicole White: The Disabilities
by Loretta White
Editor's Note: Yes, they are
related. Mrs. White is Nicole's mother, but she is also a special education
teacher. She put this report together with as little bias as possible just as
if she were doing a report on any special education student.
Nicole, now 11 years old, was a 3 pound, 14
ounces preemie. She was born in Calcutta, India. She lives with her adoptive
parents and three siblings. She is deaf-blind which presents as total blindness
(secondary to Retrolental Fibroplasia) and asymmetrical high frequency hearing
loss (mild in the right ear and moderate to severe in the left ear). She has
a history of grand mal seizures.
Occupational Therapy evaluations have findings
of delay in fine motor, perceptual-motor, and gross-motor skills approximately
2 years below expectation. Her school reports poor and inappropriate behavioral
patterns. Psychological assessments place her cognitive functioning in the low-average
range with significant discrepancies in her overall profile. She has significant
weaknesses in identifying common objects placed in her hands and poor sensory
integration.
Nicole displayed above average strengths in
measures of memory functioning, including both long- and short-term memory.
Her high frequency hearing loss appears to have an impact on her language processing
which may be exacerbating her distractibility and attention to task, as testing
placed her in the defective ranges. Nicole displays an aversion to certain materials
and her strength, while bilaterally equally, is below expectation for grip strength
in her upper extremities.
Diagnostic formulations state that Nicole has
a mild to moderate neuro-cognitive disorder, central nervous system dysfunction,
attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, predominately hyperactive-impulsive
type in the mild to moderate range, anxiety disorder due to blindness, mild
cerebral palsy syndrome, and uncontrollable grand mal seizures in the moderate
range. She also has a learning disorder in the mild to moderate range, which
is further defined as a central integrative processing disorder. She has educational
problems related to discord with teachers and peers and an inadequate social
environment.
Nicole White: The Sister
by Holly White
Nicole is a beautiful girl. She has black hair
and brown skin. She is eleven years old and her birthday is November 21. She
is interesting.
Nicole has a large family. She has seven brothers
and three sisters. Six of the brothers are half and one sister is half. She
has two loving and caring parents, Joe and Loretta. Her sisters that live with
her are Alicia (9) and Holly (12). She has a nephew living with her named Joey
who is 8 years old.
Nicole enjoys many things. Music is one of her
favorites. She is very good at keyboarding. She plays by ear and makes up her
own songs that are really quite good. Her favorite type of music is Bluegrass.
She likes to play it really loud so of course our parents yell at her to turn
it down.
She loves food. Her favorite is spicy food,
especially Cajun. Of course, she was in heaven when we went to New Orleans.
She will even eat things she doesn't particularly like if you add hot sauce.
She also loves crunchies such as chips, cookies, and crackers. She can't stand
slimy foods like oatmeal and bananas.
Nicole is into Barbies. Her favorites are Teacher
Barbie and Barbie and Ginger (the walking, talking dog). She has a red Barbie
corvette, bed, and more. She likes to use her Barbie answering machine, too.
She has a lot of toy dogs. She pretends she
is the head of Seeing Eye and she trains the dogs to be guide dogs for the blind.
That's unusual since she usually hates soft things such as soft and fuzzy fur.
She has given each one a name and a personality. Some are nice but some are
pesky who bark in the middle of the night.
Laura Ingalls Wilder is Nicole's favorite author.
She loves all the books about Little House on the Prairie. She likes
to pretend to be the characters. When she reads one of the books in Braille,
my mom lets her do things in the old-fashioned way. Her favorite was making
sausage, but she also liked making butter and washing clothes on a washboard.
She did not like washing dishes without a dishwasher.
In school her favorite subject is Social Studies
because she likes learning about and creating land features. She is home-taught
by her excellent mother. When she gets mad at Mom she writes her memos. Nicole
named our homeschool the Whitehouse Academy. She calls my mom the Headmistress.
My Dad used to be the Superintendent but she fired him. Now he is just the Principal.
Nicole loves telling lame jokes. Knock, knock
this and knock, knock that. She thinks that they are all very hilarious. The
jokes are pretty good the first ten times but after that they get boring.
Nicole has an interesting personality. She sees
things a little differently. She is like a banana on an apple tree, so she is
never boring (except for her jokes). She is loving and helpful, but she can
also be really annoying at times. I guess all siblings are like that. After
all, I am her sister. But through thick and thin she is a sweet little sister.
I love her.
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