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In early September of 1976, after a glorious three-month summer vacation, I returned to Tropical Elementary to start school as a sixth grader in Mrs. Mildred Vaughan’s class in Room 10. I had passed fifth grade with unimpressively average grades, but I managed to remain mainstreamed in the regular classes rather than getting a transfer […]

In the fall of 1975, almost three years after my arrival at Tropical Elementary, I was granted my fondest wish: a transfer from the school’s Special Education department to Mrs. Anne Brown’s regular fifth grade class. I had been Mrs. Margo Chambers’ student from November of 1972 to June of 1975, and although I was […]

I arrived at Tropical Elementary School on a cold Monday morning in mid-November 1972, only a few days after I was told I could no longer attend my neighborhood school, Coral Park Elementary. My third grade teacher there was apparently not prepared to deal with a nine-year-old boy who had cerebral palsy and hadn’t yet […]

In the spring of 1972, my mom Beatriz and I returned to Miami after deplaning a Colombian airliner, to begin a new life in the United States after living in Bogota for nearly five years. We’d left Miami in 1967, two years after my dad, Jeronimo, died in a plane crash near the Miami International Airport […]

Although the passage of time has put considerable distance between my childhood years and my middle aged present, I remember that the five or so years when Mom, my older sister, and I lived in Bogota, the capital of Colombia, were almost idyllic. We lived well in Colombia because my mother was from a wealthy […]

Peoria, Arizona high school student Caleb Norling didn’t let cerebral palsy get in his way when he scored a run for his school’s special-needs “challenge” baseball game this week. AZ Central reports that Norling, a senior at Peoria Centennial High School, lived out his lifelong dream on Monday, determined to help his team win. As he leaned on his […]