With son behind bars, mother wages battles for his education

[alp227]

Yamileth Fuentes constantly worried about her son Michael's education.

As the mother of a child with learning disabilities, she made sure he didn't get overlooked in school. She fretted when his math worksheets weren't challenging enough, or when his spelling slipped.

The energetic 42-year-old Metro bus driver wasn't afraid to fight on her son's behalf. She enlisted the help of clergymen, bureaucrats and an army of lawyers in the battle to get Michael a proper education. Once, she even stopped her bus to confront the mayor when she spotted him giving a news conference on a downtown street corner.

She believed, as countless other parents do, that her child should be given every opportunity to succeed.
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Even if he was sitting behind bars, accused of murder.

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Yamileth was 21 when she gave birth to Michael Garcia, her third child. He was a boy who loved to dance, was scared of thunder and didn't like being alone.

When he was still very young, Yamileth began noticing oddities in the way Michael spoke. He had trouble finding the right words and sounds, and his sentences were a jumble. Kids teased him about it. In elementary school, he was diagnosed with a speech and language impairment and an auditory processing disorder.

Michael never liked the special education label. It's just that you have a different way of learning, Yamileth told him. But the attention seemed to make him feel inadequate. He grew frustrated and started cutting class.

--snip--

In early 2006, Yamileth got a call from a detective looking for Michael.

He wanted to interview Michael about an incident the teen had witnessed, the detective told her. She didn't think much of it. Michael was picked up that afternoon.

Around 10 that night, her phone rang again. This time, the detective told her Michael was under arrest.

Authorities charged him with murder and attempted murder for two shootings in South Los Angeles.

In the first, a car-to-car shooting left a man dead and a woman wounded. Michael was accused of being in the gunman's car.

--snip--

Yamileth quickly became a regular at Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar, where she visited her son every weekend. She often still wore her blue bus driver's uniform and carried a lawn chair for the lengthy wait in the sun.

Michael was housed in the high security "compound," with an extra set of fences. Facing transfer to adult court, the teens in the compound were deemed too dangerous to come into contact with other juveniles, much less go to school with them.

Michael told his mother that classes inside the compound comprised a couple of hours a day at the steel picnic tables where a teacher would pass out worksheets. She asked him to fold away one of the sheets to show her what he was learning. She was appalled to see single-digit addition for her 15-year-old son, who was in ninth grade before his arrest.

Full story: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0928-michael-20100928,0,3538918,full.story

[dkf]

1. Why aren't we providing an education to inmates regardless of whether they need special Ed?

Isn't this a missed opportunity?