Berkeley

Special Ed Student Languishes After Berkeley High Takes Away Instructional Aide

Published

9 years ago

September 23, 2014

Nineteen-year-old Berkeley High student Anthony Gaines sits inside a room beyond our understanding within his own mind and wonders why one of his best friends, his mentor, and his constant daytime companion of three years has now deserted him.

At least, we believe that’s what Anthony Gaines is thinking. Anthony is non-verbal, has been blind since birth and began losing most of his hearing soon afterwards, and so while his thoughts may be complex, he is only able to express them in the most restricted of forms.

He has been diagnosed with Norrie Syndrome, a rare genetic disease. Because of Anthony’s limited ability to communicate with the world, no-one is able to explain to him that his longtime mentor has not deserted him at all, but has been transferred from responsibility for his care by the helper’s employers, Berkeley High School.

Stacey Rodgers

Anthony’s mother, Stacey Rodgers, has an additional reason why she can’t give her son an explanation.

“I can’t tell him why Linnette isn’t working with him any more because I don’t know, myself,” Rodgers said. “They haven’t told me anything other than that they have the authority to transfer her.”

The Linnette that Rodgers is talking about is Linnette Robinson, an Instructional Assistant (IA) at Berkeley High School. As a special needs student, Anthony is eligible to attend public school until he is 22. He attends Berkeley High because he lives full time at Build House, a West Berkeley home for children with severe disabilities.

Rodgers, a single mother, does not live with him, but visits with him several times a week.

While a lead teacher runs the classroom in which Anthony spends his day at Berkeley High, the Instructional Assistant must be at his side constantly while at school, including getting him to and from the bus and the bathroom and overseeing his eating at lunch and snack times.

His IA is his lifeline to the world.

When Robinson first met Anthony at Berkeley High School four years ago, he had been assigned to another IA. “At the time, nobody wanted to work with Anthony because he would have violent outbursts.”

The problem was, Robinson later learned, that neither the teacher nor the instructional assistant assigned to Anthony were communicating with him. “They weren’t signing with him,” she said.

Signing is a particular challenge in communicating with deaf-blind individuals. While a deaf sighted person can see both the familiar standard American Sign Language hand signals as well as the physical expressions and mannerisms of the person they are “talking” with, a deaf-blind person

Berkeley High School

uses a special form of that sign language done exclusively by hand contact.

Anthony has access to a cochlear implant that allows him hearing in one ear, but an earlier device frequently malfunctioned, and he has had trouble adapting to its replacement.

“If he was wearing his cochlear implant, they would simply give him orders, versus him being able to communicate back to them,” Robinson said. “He had no way of releasing any information.”

Robinson was soon assigned to take over instructional assistant responsibilities for Anthony. The first thing she said she did was to ask the lead teacher in the class: “What sign language does Anthony use? What words does he know? And the teacher didn’t know. Nobody had told him.

“So I started working with Anthony to do things like say that he had to go to the bathroom. I started getting him to walk up and down the hallway until he could do it on his own.”

Robinson began to see progress: “We got to the point where we would sit there arguing back and forth using sign language. The other staff members couldn’t believe it. They didn’t know he could do things like that.

“We had progressed to the point where Anthony’s mother said he had signed to her that he needed to go to the bathroom, and then got up and went. He’d never done that before.”

Anthony’s mother had made formal complaints to Berkeley school officials about Anthony’s educational environment during his first year at Berkeley High. Although Rogers continued to press Berkeley High School officials to add more items to her son’s learning day, she held off on formal complaints after Robinson took over as Anthony’s IA and she began to see him progressing at the school for the first time.

At the same time, his outbursts and acting out at school decreased dramatically. But then abruptly after three years of progress, without prior warning to either Robinson or Rodgers, Robinson was taken off Anthony’s assignment at the beginning of the 2013-14 school year.

In a complaint filed with Berkeley Unified School District in January of this year, Rodgers wrote that “Anthony had formed a trusting relationship with [Robinson] and had progressed well under her instruction. I was promised [by school officials] that the new IA was trained in sign language and that [Robinson] would train the new person so that a transition…would occur.”

“Both things…were lies,” she continued. “The first week of school my son worked with a substitute Instructional Assistant. In the first month of school my son experienced a new untrained classroom teacher (no deaf/blind training), a new classroom in a new building, and an IA with absolutely no training.”

Responding, Berkeley Unified School District Public Information Officer Mark Copland called the Robinson complaint “ancient history,” adding that the Berkeley School Board had already upheld Robinson’s transfer from working with Anthony.

Copland did not return several phone messages asking to speak with someone at Berkeley High with direct knowledge about Anthony’s case.

While Robinson wants to be returned to work with Anthony, she said she has been told by school officials that they want to use her skills with other children. However, she has her own theory about her reassignment.

“It’s because I talk to Stacey,” Robinson said, explaining, “I think it’s a Black-White thing. I’ve seen a number of Caucasian kids – if their parents don’t want a particular staff member on their case, they take them off their case. If they say they want something for their student, they get something for their student.”

“Since Stacey is a fighter, they’re going to show her she’s not going to get what she wants,” Robinson said. “They told me before I met her that she was crazy, but after I met her, I found out all she was trying to do was get them to do the things they’re supposed to do for her child, like any parent would do.”

Anthony, Rodgers and Robinson are African-American.

Robinson said that by her observation, Anthony has regressed in the year since she was removed from his assignment. “They’re back to doing things for him, when I had been getting him to do things for himself,” she said.

“They’re not challenging him,” she continued. All that dancing and happiness he had, he doesn’t do any more. He has a sullen look on his face all the time.”

He has also acted out in other ways, with increasing incidents of stripping off his clothes at school or becoming violent with school staff.

“I’m going to ask them again to assign Linnette to Anothony,” Rodgers said as the new school year begins. “I hope they listen to me this time. He was doing so well with her. He’s going to end up being at Berkeley High for seven years. I don’t want the rest of his time to be a waste.”

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New Banners Celebrate 150+ Years of Berkeley’s Prominence in Teaching World Languages

Berkeley has “a longstanding commitment to linguistic diversity and the humanistic insights that come from the study of world languages, literatures and cultures,” said Rick Kern, French professor and chair of the French department. “We think that Berkeley can be a model of multilingual global engagement.”

Published

3 weeks ago

November 4, 2023

Oakland Post

Collectively, undergraduates at Berkeley speak more than 220 different first languages. Offering instruction in at least 60 languages, Berkeley is one of the nation's top institutions for the breadth and depth of its world languages program. The program also values revitalizing and preserving endangered languages. Neil Freese/UC Berkeley.

Some 60 languages are taught on campus and revitalizing and preserving endangered languages is a priority

By Gretchen Kell, UC Berkeley News

At least 60 languages — from Mongolian and Old Norse to Polish, Catalan, Ancient Egyptian, Arabic and Biblical Hebrew — are taught at UC Berkeley, one of the nation’s top institutions for the breadth and depth of its world languages program.

A growing emphasis also is being placed at Berkeley on revitalizing and preserving endangered languages, most of them spoken by Indigenous peoples.

To help honor more than 150 years of global languages at Berkeley, 63 colorful banners began flying throughout campus last week — and for the next 18 months — that feature facts about the campus’s language programs, as well as 21 bilingual and multilingual faculty members, students and alumni.

Among the messages on the banners:

Collectively, undergraduates at UC Berkeley speak more than 220 different first languages.
More than 500 language learning classes are taught at Berkeley annually.
More than 6,000 Berkeley students enroll in those classes each year.
In 1872, the first endowed chair in the UC system was created — for the study of East Asian languages at Berkeley.
Students at all UC campuses can take online African language classes at Berkeley, which is well-known for Amharic, Igbo and Swahili instruction.

Across the country, some colleges and universities are eliminating world language courses to save money. West Virginia’s flagship public university, for example, recently ended courses and degree programs in all foreign languages except Spanish and Chinese.

Meanwhile, Berkeley has “a longstanding commitment to linguistic diversity and the humanistic insights that come from the study of world languages, literatures and cultures,” said Rick Kern, French professor and chair of the French department. “We think that Berkeley can be a model of multilingual global engagement.”

Kern is co-chair of the campus’s Task Force on Languages, Language-Based Disciplines and Global Citizenship that was initiated by Sara Guyer, dean of the College of Letters and Sciences’ Division of Arts and Humanities.

The committee met for three semesters and presented its recommendations last summer on how the campus can enhance and support instructional and research strengths in global languages.

Guyer said the study of so many languages on campus “opens up new worlds of knowledge, research and communication.” She added that Berkeley’s steadfast commitment to multilingualism is an effort to help students become global citizens who can “interact meaningfully with people and ideas from different regions of our fast-changing world.”

Activism

Family Seeks Justice for Murdered Daughter on 14th Anniversary of Her Death

Dezzy’s mother, Dru Ann Davis, said, “How could this irreversible horror, caused by idiots, have happened to my, our, Dezzy? “A soul that hurt no one and wanted to do good work with animals and people. If you can provide information on any of these killers, please be brave and contact Oakland Police. You may be the one to bring a sense of peace to the lives of Dezzy’s family.” The Family Support Advocates joins with the grieving family and loved ones of Desiree Dezzy Davis’ in their pursuit of justice.

Published

1 month ago

October 15, 2023

Oakland Post

Desiree ‘Dezzy’ Davis was a girl of many talents: swimmer, athlete, and writer. Photo courtesy of Dru Ann Davis.

By Family Support Advocates
Special to The Post

Desiree Davis was only 17 years old when she was senselessly murdered in North Oakland 14 years ago on September 7, 2009. Desiree, or Dezzy as she preferred, was a beautiful little girl that instantly liked people, adults included.

Dez was artistic, a good swimmer and athlete, an animal lover who wanted to be a veterinarian, a good writer in prose and poetry and she could rap lyrics to a great many songs. She was a naturally happy kid who loved so much of life.

When Dez started school, she was criticized for an eye imperfection, which sometimes made her sad and isolated, but it didn’t stop her from pursuing happiness.

Dez was independent and didn’t mind working for the extra things she wanted for herself. She worked three jobs by the time she was 16, and especially loved working at The Black Repertory Theater in Berkeley. As she began her senior year in high school, just before her murder, she was co-editor of the school’s yearbook, began running track and volunteered at the Berkeley Humane Society. She was gaining in self-confidence and trying new interests.

Dezzy’s mother, Dru Ann Davis, said, “How could this irreversible horror, caused by idiots, have happened to my, our, Dezzy?

“A soul that hurt no one and wanted to do good work with animals and people. If you can provide information on any of these killers, please be brave and contact Oakland Police. You may be the one to bring a sense of peace to the lives of Dezzy’s family.”

The Family Support Advocates joins with the grieving family and loved ones of Desiree Dezzy Davis’ in their pursuit of justice.

Anyone in the community with information about Dezzy’s murder is asked to contact the Homicide Section at (510) 238-3821 or the TIP LINE at (510) 238-7950. CrimeStoppers of Oakland is offering a reward for an arrest in this case. #JusticeforDesiree.

FAMILY SUPPORT ADVOCACY TASK FORCE

The mission of the Family Support Advocacy Task Force, a committee of the Violence Prevention Coalition, is to advocate for local, state and federal policies and legislation to enhance and expand support to families and friends of those who experienced violence; for more compassionate and transparent communication between law enforcement, the district attorney with the family of homicide victims and to push for the elimination of all violence, but particularly gun violence and homicides.

Berkeley

Harriet Tubman Terrace Residents Celebrate Win Against Tenant Abuse

After two years of being misled, stonewalled, and left to live in hazardous conditions, residents at an apartment complex for low-income senior citizens will celebrate the fruits of their strong organizing efforts – the appointment of a paid housing advocate by the City of Berkeley.

Published

2 months ago

October 11, 2023

Oakland Post

Harriet Tubman Terrace renters endured years of abuse when contractors making repairs made gross mistakes, they say. Foundation Housing file photo.

By Paola Laverde and Tony Chapelle

Everyone who lives in Berkeley is invited to join the victorious seniors and community members on Saturday, Sept. 9^th between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. for a celebration and rally at the Harriet Tubman Terrace apartments, 2870 Adeline St., in South Berkeley. The event will include a drum march, press conference, speakers, food, and music performances.

The new advocate is a liaison to monitor living conditions and services between tenants, FPI Management Company (FPI) and the landlord investment group led by Foundation Housing.

Harriet Tubman Terrace is a low-income senior apartment complex that was originally built to house musicians and other artists in their old age. FPI is a privately-owned, third-party property manager for senior facilities that are funded by Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC).

“Our hard work has paid off,” said Dar Oyamasela, president of the tenants’ association at Harriet Tubman Terrace. “We have won Round One, but the struggle continues.”

In 2022, the 91-unit Harriet Tubman Terrace underwent a major remodeling with the contractors making mistakes and violating numerous building codes.

Tenants lived in dangerous conditions as workmen tore out kitchens, bathrooms, and closets in their apartments while exposing residents to deadly asbestos. The poor remodeling included installation of flimsy, sometimes unusable, replacement fixtures. Sliding-glass patio door frames were installed improperly and let in air and rain. The management relocated tenants to dirty, bug-ridden empty units in the building, often not caring that they were not accessible for disabled residents. Several tenants suffered the loss or destruction of personal items and family heirlooms.

The appalling conditions are shown in a YouTube video report, “Harriet Tubman Terrace Residents Face Horrendous Violations in their Homes,” with a link at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWB1FrIZ1rE.

While the residents and community celebrate the appointment of the paid ombudsman, the rally will also acknowledge the importance of empowering low-income senior tenants, many of whom are isolated and afraid to speak up for their housing rights.

“The advocate will approach management for us. That alone is helpful, as most of the residents are fearful of the management but not of the advocate,” said Elaine Bloom, a Harriet Tubman Terrace resident. “An ally will help us to live in safe housing and have quiet enjoyment in this our ‘forever’ home.”

Many members of the neighborhood consider the two-year ordeal for the seniors at Harriet Tubman an affront to all of South Berkeley. The grassroots group Friends of Adeline says the community and Berkeley City Council should be outraged.

The Friends of Adeline calls it elder abuse, abuse by contractors, and ownership. “This is an indication of lack of concern for the people who live in [this] city,” the group says.

For more information, contact Paola Laverde at Plaverde64@gmail.com or Tony Chapelle at TonyChapelle@hotmail.com.