“Mr. and Mrs. Stauffer, I have good news and bad news. Your daughter tests like a ‘genius’ verbally. Unfortunately, she is r——- in math.”
I didn’t hear the word genius. All I heard was The R Word. As with 
many kids in those days, it went no further. No tests. No conversations. The adults in my second-grade life simply decided the gifted program wasn’t for me.
Shame! I felt shame every time the gifted students closed their books and left the room for the magical world of the Gifted Program. I was not among them. You couldn’t go to the Gifted Program if you were The R Word in math.
I spent the next 40 years of my life hiding from math. I was, after all, r——- in math. Journalism made sense. I did well at it. Did somebody say I had genius? No. In the back of my head, decades later, the stigma of The R Word still lurked. It was the first thing that came to mind when I was named a division publisher. Me? Corporate had better give me a good accountant.
Well, they did. But a tidier ending would go like this: And then The Arc New London County called and asked if I wanted to be their CEO. Having been labeled with The R Word early in life, it seemed a perfect fit. I would leave a successful publishing career to advocate for people with Intellectual Disability. I would champion the rights of people who, like me, suffered the stigma of The R Word.
But that’s not how it happened.
I’d run from The R Word all my life. I took the job because it seemed interesting and worthwhile. But the last thing I wanted was to tell somebody that I’d been called The R Word myself. So, I didn’t. Because of what The R Word did to me, I finally mustered the courage to apply for graduate school at age 48. Did going to work for The Arc NLC make me feel braver? I’d like to think so. But, despite a straight-A average, a cold sweat gripped me as I sat in class my first day of statistics. I was 51.
The Arc was founded 65 years ago by parents whose children in those days were not welcome in our public schools. The belief back then was that children with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) could not learn. One of our founding parents was mocked by a pediatrician for trying to teach her boy with Down syndrome to read.
Well, he did learn to read. And I passed graduate statistics. That’s what’s so offensive about The R Word. It implies that people can’t grow, can’t learn. And we can.
Kathleen Stauffer is the chief executive officer of The Arc New London County. For information on The Arc, go to www.thearcnlc.org.
