Valedictorian, Interrupted

I was valedictorian at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. I had the highest TAKS test scores in my grade level. Four scholarships. A BrailleNote — my graduation present from the school. A position I’d earned through years of work while managing blindness, undiagnosed IIH, chronic pain, and a brain that was already struggling in ways I didn’t have words for yet.

Two weeks before graduation, I had to go home.

They stripped my scholarships. They came to my house to take back the BrailleNote when we wouldn’t send it. They removed my name as valedictorian. I got my diploma in the mail.

What Happened #

The short version is that I couldn’t stay. The longer version is that I’d been asking for help I wasn’t getting, and by the time the school acknowledged there was a problem, the solution wasn’t support. It was removal.

I’d been placed on the college track. I was academically gifted — verbal comprehension in the 86th percentile, working memory in the 99th. The system saw intelligence and compliance and concluded I’d be fine. What it didn’t see, or chose not to see, was everything else: adaptive behavior in the 4th percentile, socialization in the 1st. A brain that couldn’t initiate tasks, couldn’t sequence steps, couldn’t manage daily life without someone to structure and guide it.

The evaluation documented the gap. It recommended more support, not less. The school ignored its own findings.

When I asked to be moved to the support track, they refused. I was too smart for the support track. Too capable on paper. The test scores said I belonged with the college-bound students, and the test scores were what mattered.

So I stayed on the college track, without the support I needed, until I couldn’t stay anymore.

The Gap #

Here’s what the school couldn’t reconcile: I was both things at once. Gifted and disabled. Capable of scoring in the 99th percentile and incapable of initiating a task without someone to prompt me. Able to write at a college level and unable to manage the daily logistics of being a student.

This is the gap that runs through my entire life. The same person who was valedictorian can’t reliably start a task without help. The same person who earned four scholarships needs someone to say “it’s time to eat now” or the meal doesn’t happen. The same person who scored higher than anyone else in her grade on the TAKS test can’t always find the word for “refrigerator” in conversation.

The school saw the first half of each sentence and stopped reading.

That’s not unusual. Schools for the blind have a long history of emphasizing independence above all else. The only additional disability consistently acknowledged is deafblindness. Autism, executive dysfunction, chronic illness — the conditions multiply disabled blind students actually have — are rarely part of the conversation. If you’re smart and you’re blind, the assumption is that blindness is your only barrier. Remove the visual obstacle, provide Braille and a screen reader, and you should be fine.

I wasn’t fine. I was drowning. And the school’s response to my drowning wasn’t to throw me a lifeline. It was to document that I’d failed to swim.

What They Took #

The scholarships were the practical loss. Four of them, gone. College was supposed to be the next step, the thing the college track had been preparing me for, and suddenly the financial path to get there was closed.

The BrailleNote was the symbolic one. It was my graduation present — the tool that was supposed to carry me into the next phase of my life. A BrailleNote is a portable Braille computer, a notetaker, a way for a blind student to read and write independently. We wouldn’t send it back, so they came to my house to take it. Taking it back wasn’t just taking a device. It was taking the future it represented.

The valedictorian title was the public erasure. I’d earned it. The grades were real, the test scores were real, the work was real. But the school decided that leaving — even for reasons the school itself had contributed to — meant forfeiting everything.

I did walk the stage, eventually. My mom fought for it, and the next year, I got to graduate with the following class. But I didn’t get to be valedictorian. I didn’t get the scholarships back. I didn’t get the BrailleNote back. I got to walk, and that was all.

When they came to my house for the BrailleNote, one of the teachers said it out loud. Something like: you know, if you had walked the stage with your class, you would have been valedictorian. You would have gotten the scholarships and the technology. As if I didn’t know. As if the reason I wasn’t walking wasn’t that the school had refused to support me, but that I had failed to stay.

That’s the part that still stings, fifteen years later. Not just that they took everything. That they made it feel like my fault.

The System’s Logic #

I understand the logic. I just think it’s wrong.

The logic says that if you can’t complete the program as designed, you haven’t earned the rewards. The logic says that accommodations are for getting you through, not for changing the timeline. The logic says that leaving early, for any reason, means you didn’t really finish.

But the logic doesn’t account for students whose disabilities make the timeline itself a barrier. It doesn’t account for students who are doing extraordinary work under conditions the system refuses to see. It doesn’t account for the fact that sometimes the most impressive thing isn’t finishing on time — it’s finishing at all.

I didn’t leave because I stopped trying. I left because the system that was supposed to support me had decided I didn’t fit its categories. Too disabled for the college track, too smart for the support track, and no third option available.

What I Know Now #

It’s been fifteen years. I’ve tried college five times. Every attempt ended the same way — my body or my brain giving out before the semester did. The gap that TSBVI documented and ignored has followed me through every educational attempt since.

But I also know this: the test scores were real. The intelligence was real. The work I did at TSBVI was real, even if the school chose to erase it. I was valedictorian. Not in the way they wanted me to be — not on their stage, not in their ceremony, not with their recognition. I walked the stage the next year because my mom fought to make it happen, but I walked as a graduate, not as valedictorian. The title was already gone. The scholarships were already gone. The BrailleNote was already gone. I got to walk, and that was something, but it wasn’t what I’d earned.

And the BrailleNote? I never got it back. But I built a life that uses technology in ways that BrailleNote couldn’t have imagined. I write. I advocate. I build things. The tools are different, but the person using them is the same one who scored in the 99th percentile and needed help to start a task. Both things are still true.

The system failed me. It failed to see the gap between my intelligence and my disability. It failed to create a track for students who were both gifted and disabled. It failed to support me, and when I couldn’t continue without support, it punished me for leaving.

But the system’s failure isn’t the end of the story. It’s the beginning of the one I’ve been writing ever since.