THE BILLY PROJECT
Welcome to the
Billy Project
Every night it was the same story...
We sat around the kitchen table. Probably eating spaghetti or stir-fry. My mom would drop her fork to her plate, and put her hands to her head while shaking it violently. Then she would tell us a story. "You would not believe what Billy did today." Whether it was Eric, flipping tables and chairs, Matthew, threatening to stab students with pencils, or Maddie, hiding beneath a desk for half the day, the stories my mom took home from her second grade classroom never failed to shock or entertain our dinner table talk.
Methods
From night after night of watching my mother go on about the lack of support she was receiving with trouble students, the stories accumulated into a single narrative. How could teachers be constantly put in a position where 90% of their energy goes to a child who should be getting additional help? What does a child that young with a disability look like? And how does a child even qualify for help?
For this project, I set out on a mission to collect even more stories. Stories like my mothers, but also the stories of parents and the systems that are implemented to alter a struggling child's story.
Soon enough, I started noticing how controversial the issue of childhood disability is, and how varied the stories surrounding the topic are.
I conducted two interviews. One was a group of second and third grade teachers. The second was a parent of a child with a disability, who was also a member of a Child Study Team (the system that public schools use to asses and intervene with he parents of children with potential disabilities). Through these three lenses, my research resulted in rich, multifaceted and international stories that both correlated and contradicted one another. By zooming out of these contradictions and mapping their archetypes, social and political systems, I began my exploration of the ways these perspective's stories shape the story of a young child struggling behaviorally in the public school system.
The Hope
Early childhood disability continues to be an misunderstood and under-researched issue. Even as mental illness awareness is increasing, the thought of children struggling with these issues challenges our preconceptions about what a disability is and who can have them.
In general, its not something we talk about often. When it does come up, no one quite knows what to say. But we are living in a time where minorities are rising up to be understood. And the minority that is young children with behavioral and mental disabilities is a minority that can't necessarily do that for themselves. Instead, they are dependent on the parents, teachers, and systems that have the resources to spread awareness, the need for research, and understanding.
By collecting the beliefs and stories of these three dependent perspectives, the parents, teachers, and teams, I hope to reveal the ways that the systems cohere and convolute the story of change that is stirring the world currently. With the transition to online school, due to the Covid-19 outbreak, our social understandings are being dismantled. This dismantling is producing new stories that expose the cracks in our systems. I hope to be a factor in the the realization and investigation of the splitting seams that is our understandings and copings with childhood disability.
This is an organization rooted in stories and anti stories. By looking at all these characters, I am hoping to reveal an overall narrative about how we view children with disabilities and where the conversation is heading in the future.
