He has autism and in CABA they wanted to send him to a special school: today he feels “pride” for his achievements in a common secondary school

Ezequiel López Bazzi is a 14-year-old teenager who is in his second year at a public high school in Palermo. He is a fan of Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez and Avril Lavigne. He dresses in dark colored clothes and has a haircut typical of boys his age. When he becomes reflective, He realizes that autism is part of his identity but it is not the only thing that defines him. He further says that he is “proud of his achievements”.With that word he refers, for example, to the fact that since the middle of last year he has been without the support of an integrative teacher, something she needed from room four. Analía Bazzi, his mother, listens to him and doesn’t even think of interrupting him. That achievement makes her doubly proud. Only she knows what she had to fight to prevent her son from was referred to the special school when he was four years old. “I am very proud of myself for how I was able to socialize with my peers,” says EzequielEzequiel has been in the school system for 12 years. He started the initial level in a room of 2 because his mother was convinced that this was the best way for a boy to socialize and acquire habits. He had lived this way with Sebastián and Ludmila, his eldest children: “In the early years, there were no very conclusive signs that one could attribute to a health problem. spoke little, but we attributed it to the fact that he was the youngest of three brothers, very pampered, and it was enough for him to point to something for us to give it to him,” recalls Bazzi, an entrepreneur who sells clothes and shoes at different Buenos Aires fairs. Ezequiel He was a kindergarten student in Colegiales, belonging to the same public school that his brothers attended. During the first year of kindergarten, neither the woman nor the teachers in charge of the boy’s group noticed anything that caught their attention. But, in room 3, the situation changed. The reports of the teachers began to be more and more frequent about the boy throwing himself on the floor, taking off his shoes at any moment and being able to remain lying on the ground looking at nothing without being attracted by something that was happening around him. “I started having meetings in the garden. Increasingly frequent. They told me this kind of situations and also They told me they were taking him out of the classroom, who took him to the address”, describes the woman and continues: “But I didn’t work, I took him to socialize. And that wasn’t happening. So I asked that they save the vacancy for me until the following year while we did studies to explain that behavior.”Ezequiel López Bazzi with Analía, his motherHernan Zenteno – La Nacion/Hernan ZentenoSince the family did not have social work, Bazzi took him to the Garrahan hospital. there the doctors he was diagnosed with PDD (Pervasive Developmental Disorders) and they recommended to the woman that she manage the Unique Certificate of Disability. “The doctors also informed me that, by having the CUD, Ezu would be able to access a social work to manage her therapies. But they also told me that the social work they gave did not work very well, so they recommended that I sign up for the monotax, to be able to access something better, ”he adds. He immediately joined a social work as a monotributista and managed everything necessary so that Your child will start their therapies as soon as possible. A few months later, Ezequiel was already undergoing treatment and she returned to the garden to tell the news. There they told her that, in order to rejoin her, Ezequiel would have to be evaluated by the district’s School Orientation Team (EOE), an area made up of professionals from Psychology, Psychopedagogy, Educational Sciences and dedicated to social work supervised by psychologists, social workers and educational psychologists. “Once they evaluate it, They tell me that Ezequiel he had to continue his schooling in a special school, designed for boys with pictures similar to yours. And they make me sign the pass, ”says Analía and explains that when she tells the doctors and therapists who worked with him, everyone insisted that he not accept the change, that the special school was going to stagnate him, that it was not going to provide him with the stimuli that he needed. “The professionals explained to me that the best thing for my son was to continue in a common school with an inclusive teacher,” she recalls. Desperate, Analía returned to the guidance team to state that she wanted her son to continue in a common modality school with a support teacher. “10 years ago he was much more complex and bureaucratic than the schools would allow. So the professionals did not agree very much. But there was a new evaluation that concluded that Ezu was to continue in common. The issue was resolved in the Legal area of ​​the Directorate of Initial Education”, says the woman. Finally they allowed him to start a room of 4 with an integrative teacher. Analía remembers the two years that followed in pre-school – 4th grade and preschool – with the bitter taste of the frequent meetings with the school guidance team, who kept insisting that Ezequiel would do better in a special school. finish room 5, I remember they told me, ‘here we let go of your hand’, as if implying that the primary school, without the accompaniment of that EOE team, was going to be very complex. But I was grateful that they let go of my hand, because until that moment, the only thing they had done was hinder us”, acknowledges Bazzi. The professionals who accompany the children on their school journey are called by the Buenos Aires Ministry of Education as Non-Teaching Personal Companions (APND), since they do not depend on the organization but are provided by the social or prepaid works of students who require it. Today, at the Initial level there are 411 boys who have companions. Regarding the primary level, they explained that it was not possible to record a number of companions because the data is very variable. “Yes, we can say that there is at least one companion per school. In other words, there is a presence in all primary schools,” said sources from the agency, who did not provide figures about what happens at the secondary level. They were also unable to report how many of the 588,555 students in that jurisdiction have disabilities or attend classes with some support type. “In recent years, the Buenos Aires Ministry of Education has been working on different actions related to inclusive education,” they expressed from that body. However, they detailed that the current enrollment in special schools reaches 5771 students, 10% more than 2021 tuitionwhich was 5208. In other words, contrary to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which protects the right of students to study in regular schools, there are now more girls and boys studying in special schools than last year. while according to the statistical yearbooks of the Ministry of Education of the Nation for 2021, of the total number of students with disabilities in the City in 2021, 38% still attend special schools. Referral to special schools it is just one of the faces that shows the lack of inclusion in the educational field. It is also manifested in the lack of sufficient support and in the refusal to enroll boys and girls with disabilities, something that, in the City of Buenos Aires, occurs especially in privately managed institutions. In 2019, the Civil Association for the Equality and Justice sued the Buenos Aires Ministry of Education for not guaranteeing inclusive education and for allowing privately run common schools to deny the enrollment or enrollment of students with disabilities. In June of this year, that legal action had a first key ruling: the City Justice ordered the Government of Buenos Aires to develop a public policy that would guarantee the access of children with disabilities to private educational establishments. “Inclusion is much more to get a vacancy. It is also everything that happens after, once the student enters the educational system. Although there are not so many obstacles to entry in the public management institutions of Buenos Aires, it is observed that there are no adequate support devices. A) Yes, students with disabilities are often recommended for referral to special schools, forced to repeat, or given short hours”, analyzes Celeste Fernández, deputy programmatic director of ACIJ. Contrary to the forecast of the Initial Level School Orientation Team, Ezequiel’s elementary school went smoothly. “He studied every year with an accompanying teacher. There were better years than others but, more than anything for the difficulty for some teachers to understand that the boy who is with an inclusion project is their student too. Sometimes they are treated exclusively as if they were students of the integrating teacher,” laments Bazzi, while Ezequiel listens carefully. The talk takes place at the “Yo Quiero” Therapeutic Center, located in Colegiales, where the teenager works on his skills. social. Analía and her son arrived there from Abasto to talk with LA NACION. When he removes his black mask, Ezequiel greets with a shy smile. He wants to tell about his experience.“I am proud of my achievements,” says Ezequiel López Bazzi, a 14-year-old adolescent with autism who attends a regular high school without support Hernan Zenteno – La Nacion/Hernan Zenteno Also, when something didn’t work out for me, I got frustrated. For this reason, when I received help from my integrator I felt safe, it gave me that satisfaction that you feel when someone helps you and you can do what you want. In addition, their company was good for me because I could tell them things about my day to day”, explains Ezequiel, who adds that, with the grade teachers, I didn’t always achieve that confidence.As the years went by, Ezequiel needed less and less support at school. “In sixth grade, we agreed with the therapeutic team that the integrator would go three times a week and it went very well”, explains his mother. After doing seventh grade virtually due to confinement, it was decided to repeat the sixth grade scheme during the first year. But in the middle of that year, together with the school’s psycho-pedagogical office (Normal No. 6, in Palermo), it was decided to remove the supports. “This is my first full year without support. Y I feel very proud of my achievements”, expresses Ezu. The social, on the other hand, was more challenging. “Currently I am very selective with friends. This is because, in elementary school, sometimes they treated me kind of weird, in the sense that they made some jokes that maybe I didn’t understand very much, and I felt kind of insecure”, acknowledges Ezu, who imagines, in the future, linked to some activity related to social communication. with sufficient staff to become familiar with the history of each child and to be able to understand what they really need. “The educational system requires more professionals in these areas. And teachers, more training. Beyond the fact that children with disabilities have an inclusive teacher, do not have to forget that they are your students too. Everything cannot fall on the integrator. If they don’t give him that place in the classroom, it’s difficult for the rest of the students to recognize them as peers”, he considers. Today, Ezequiel is an adolescent who handles the issue of his diagnosis as something private, who chooses with whom to share. “When he was little, he didn’t know he had autism. I knew it at 9 or 10, because I started to feel different about some things and I asked. That’s where I started to get a little familiar. Now I take it as part of my identity, as part of me. I do not consider it a negativesomething bad, but as a characteristic that identifies me”, he concludes. Meet The Trust Project