Free That Went Well: Adventures in Caring for My Sister by Terrell Harris Dougan Page B

time and wanted to be go ice skating with me. I really love to skate, but my idea of skating is flying along to good music. Marriott’s idea was that I would hold her up under both arms so she would feel safe, thereby almost breaking my back.
    Thanks to my behavior modification training, I went to the snack bar and bought a small bag of M&M’s. I took Mare out on the ice and told her to just stand there. Frowning and fussing, she did. We just stood there for a minute, then one of Marriott’s feet moved just slightly forward. “Hey! Did you see that? Look what you did! How did you do that?” I said, popping an M&M into her mouth. She thought for a moment. Then her other foot moved maybe three inches. Another M&M went in her mouth. “Yes! Yes!”
    I waited. She looked at me. Then she tentatively, purposefully, moved her first foot forward, got a reward, and then brought the other foot along, and was again rewarded, all the while getting lavish praise from me.
    She was doing a little skating shuffle all around the rink by herself, and I was able to skate with a pain-free back.
    Within six months, Marriott could do little twizzles on the ice, and she was always the best skater at her friends’ skating parties. Her teeth were rotting, but, boy, could she skate!
    Meanwhile, it was time to start our next phase of the plan: let mentally disabled children go to school with normal children.
    At first the whole idea sent the parents of normal children, and their teachers, into a state of panic. How could a teacher accommodate this in a classroom? The answer came from stacks of research, much of it in Europe, pointing out that the mentally disabled make up about 3 percent of any population; so if you have a classroom of thirty “normal” children, chances are you’ll have only one mentally disabled one. If you as a teacher do nothing but just let him sit there, he will absorb the behaviors of the other children and start to improve and learn little bits on his own. Contrast that idea with bundling all special-needs kids into the same room, where they each pick up the others’ odd behaviors and learn more odd behavior.
    It was an idea whose time had come. Pennsylvania had already passed a law allowing this to become a reality. We wanted Utah to be next.
    How could we convince everyone to let all children go to school? We decided to apply Glenn Latham’s behavior modification treatment to government officials, reporters, and legislators: we caught them doing something right and thanked the hell out of them. If a reporter put something good about our programs on the news that night, we would instigate a phone-calling or letter-writing campaign to thank him for his incredibly insightful report. If a legislator spoke even one sentence of approval for our ideas, she would get notes and calls of praise.
    This startled the legislators and heads of government, who were used to receiving only criticism and pleading. Pretty soon, whenever they’d see us in the halls of the legislature, or in their waiting rooms, or in the newspaper offices, they’d say, “Well, hi. What can I do for you?”
    With that sort of support, we were able to convince the UtahLegislature to pass House Bill 105 in January 1969, entitling all children to a free public education, including the mentally disabled.
    After a few years’ hard work on the part of parents in all over the country in the ARC, Congress passed Public Law 94–142 in 1975, and now every state had to follow suit.
    We in Utah even went so far as to suggest that special-needs children who lived far from school needed to be taken by bus, the way the other children were. The school district officials agreed, after much praise from us all for their caring foresight.
    The head of the bus company at the time, Charles Boynton, was nervous about being able to get enough buses and competent drivers to handle all these kids. But at the end of the first day of service, Charlie called me and said,