Amy Burris sits across the desk from the executive director of the King’s Daughters’ School Center for Autism in Columbia, Tenn., trying to make sense of the words.
“We don’t do fund-raisers here,” the woman says with distaste, as if Amy had suggested nude bowling or a wet T-shirt contest. “We accept two sources of income at most.”
“Oh, I’ll take care of the fund-raising,” Amy protests, but the gray-haired matron cuts her off.
“Miss Burris, let me try to explain this to you.” The carefully modulated tones of culture shape her voice. Her manicured hands sport an array of gemstones. She wears tailored slacks, a long-sleeved Oxford blouse and a royal purple sweater tied at her breast.
Amy wears a knee-length flowered skirt, a sleeveless blue shirt and sparkly sandals from Old Navy. Her long brown hair is twisted into a bun. She had looked at herself approvingly in the motel room mirror that morning.
“Don’t I look motherly?” she had thought with pride.
Now the administrator is stripping that pride away.
“The parents here at the King’s Daughters’ School Center for Autism, well, they’re very committed parents who prepared financially to have children, Miss Burris. They’re architects, whose wives are physicians.” She tightens the purple sweater with each phrase. “They’re certainly not students.”
Amy is a graduate student at the University of Arkansas. She’s spent her rent money to get to Columbia, with the fevered hope of enrolling her autistic son for even a few months.
“A child with autism has ongoing needs,” the executive director explains later. “Some of our children are here for years. A few months’ work does not necessarily make a difference.”
Charlotte Battles is being truthful, but the words cut Amy’s heart like a knife. She tries to align them with the reality of her life — married at 19, pregnant at 20, a stay-at-home mom thrown into the world of autism advocacy at 24.
The questions come. How do you prepare for an autistic child? How do you deal with the fear that clutches your heart like a fist when you begin to realize something is wrong? How do you accept the chilling diagnosis, the realization that your child has just become a statistic, one of 1.5 million children in the United States with the disorder? How do you plan to parent a child with a complex developmental disability that impacts every area of his life, particularly communication and social interaction?
How do you cope?
It’s very easy to get angry at the way the director treated Amy Burris. It was probably the most condescending thing she could have said. But the true villain here is a society that values the children of architects and physicians more than the children of a speech language pathology student. What has he done to be denied the help he needs other than be born to the “wrong” mother? (And wrong definitely belongs in quotation marks when referring to Amy Burris.) If everyone is entitled to a free education in this country shouldn’t we be willing to provide that education? It is worth it to society to give everyone as much help as they need to become a functioning member of our society. It is shameful that the richest nation in the world, who claims to have a “no child left behind” policy, will not provide the necessary help that Steven Burris needs. Instead of taking care of our children, our government wastes billions of dollars in an unnecessary war.
There are two heart-wrenching stories in The Morning News about Amy Burris and her family. The first takes a close up look at her attempts to enroll Steven in a private boarding school. The second piece takes a longer look at the impact raising an autistic child has had on Amy’s life and on the rest of her family including Steven’s massive setback following his parents’ divorce. I think both of them are marvelous and anything I could add would be unnecessary. If I am half the parent Amy Burris is my children will be very lucky.
