VOORHEESVILLE — Lindsay Myers was back on her home turf this year, at Voorheesville’s high school, after spending the year before in a special-education program housed in Guilderland.
Myers said, at first, when she returned to Voorheesville she didn’t like walking around the building because she didn’t want to get lost. But, by the close of the school year, she said, "When I get upset, I can always come back to the classroom." And, if she starts to get lost: "Ms. Lewis"" Myers called out, demonstrating how her teacher, Kille Lewis, won’t be too far behind.
"I didn’t like Guilderland High School," Myers said. When asked what she didn’t like, she said, in business class, she "had to wear gloves with powder inside."

Myers said she has more friends at Voorheesville than she did at Guilderland and agreed that it makes things easier when she knows people. In one of her regular classes this spring, she sat near her next-door neighbors, kids she played with growing up.

Lewis doesn’t accompany Myers to art class. She doesn’t need a teaching assistant for that curriculum, but, instead, she had a volunteer peer buddy who helped Myers get the supplies she needs, Lewis said.
"She’s got a feel for the school and is maturing," Lewis said in June.

It was evident after a short visit to Myers’s school that she had some good peer relationship with other students in the high school, but pinning down who her good friends are was trickier.

Myers said she has some new friends and old friends at Voorheesville.
And, at the same time, she said, "Some kids at school are not nice to me."
"Sometimes I’ll be embarrassed"My face will get red," she said. "They call me the F word and the B word."

She said she got teased at both Guilderland and Voorheesville.
"Some kids are very accepting and others aren’t," no matter where Myers is placed, her mother, Lisa Myers, said. In the fall, her daughter is going to miss some of the senior girlfriends she made this year and sat with at lunch.

The tell-all for any high school kid’s social status is the cafeteria dynamic.

Myers’s favorite cafeteria foods are grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato and chicken noodle soup, and pizza, she said.
"Who do you eat lunch with"" The Enterprise asked during a June visit to Myers’s school.

Her eyes lit up as she pulled out a sheet of lined paper from her folder. Myers had drawn a bird’s-eye view of all the tables in the cafeteria and labeled who sits where. She pointed and explained that on Mondays and Tuesdays, she sits with a group of seniors, which is a table of both boys and girls. Then on Wednesdays and Thursdays, she sits with sophomores, and, on Fridays, at the freshman booth, she said.

When asked how she decided who she wanted to sit with, Myers said she did not want to sit with the kids who make burping sounds, and that she picked the kids whom she thought were the nicest. She was proud of the weekly seating arrangement she had masterminded, but, when asked why she had such an elaborate plan, her eyes turned down.

She had been sitting with the seniors every day, she said, until she found out that they didn’t want her sitting with them.

The seniors had approached the school psychologist, Lewis said, and told her that they didn’t feel like babysitting Myers all the time. They said they couldn’t talk about regular senior things with their friends with Myers there and they wanted to be able to enjoy their last year together and felt like they couldn’t with Lindsay tagging along all the time.

Rather than Myers going back and sitting with the kids from the middle school again, she, on her own at home, figured out this rotation solution, to which her senior lunch mates agreed.

Myers said it hurt her feelings at first when her friends said they didn’t want her sitting with them all the time, but now she is happy with this arrangement, she said without any bitterness in her voice.

At first, she didn’t want to come back to school, Lewis said. But Myers is learning how to shrug things off, Lewis said.

After Myers had gone off to the school store to work, The Enterprise asked Lewis how many true friends Myers had.
"Not many," she said.

She added that making better friendships was something they were working on together. She is helping Myers learn to ignore kids when they are mean, and helping her to become more comfortable with approaching new people. If someone brushes her off, Myers is learning to then just move along and not waste her time, Lewis said.
"Not everyone is going to be accepting," Lewis said, and Myers is learning to not let it bother her anymore. When the seniors told her they didn’t want her sitting with them at lunch every day, Myers didn’t cry, which was what she would have done in the past, but instead was mad, knowing that it wasn't right, Lewis said.

Myers especially has to work on being comfortable around males, even around male teachers, Lewis said.

Planning for the future

Myers told The Enterprise she would like to have a boyfriend some day and that she has plans of eventually moving out of her parents’ house and living on her own with some roommates.

Lewis said Myers is at the age now — she’s 17 — that they are starting to think about career plans and also future living plans as she becomes a young adult.

During their one-on-one sessions, Myers and Lewis are also researching together what types of schools and jobs might be good for her as she gets older.

Myers told The Enterprise she wants to be a grown-up person and cook whatever she wants. She would like to be a chef for her career, she said.

They’ve looked at what the entry positions are, such as a kitchen helper doing hands-on food preparation. They are considering in her last few years in high school, as part of her individualized education program, vocational culinary training. They’ve researched working in a banquet hall and becoming a cake designer or pastry chef.

Since Myers is guaranteed education until age 21 all year long, even in the summer time, Mrs. Myers said she wants to have her daughter receive a job coach and enter a program where she can receive job training instead of going to regular summer school, which she had done in the past.
No kid "wants to go to summer school," especially when their siblings are on break, Mrs. Myers said. The program gives teens with special needs job training and placement in a local business.

The vision for Myers’s future living situation is to find a great small assisted-living home with roommates with mental disabilities, ideally a few people Myers already knows.

Just as Lewis was discussing this, a Voorheesville special-needs student walked down the hall; Lewis motioned, tilting her head toward him.

He stopped to say hello to Lewis and the Enterprise reporter told him that the newspaper was visiting Myers to write an article and asked him if he could share anything about her.
"She’s a pretty girl. She’s nice and has an awesome personality," he said.

A handful of Myers’s friends from her middle-school special-education class are still in that program. She sees them during fifth period when she works at the school store with them. It’s a place, she said, where students can buy pencils and candies.
"I try to do most of the work and money," she said, "but not to steal money, not stuff like that; I don’t want to do that," she said.

Myers’s mother said that her daughter still keeps in touch with a few girls she met while in the BOCES class at Guilderland High School, but they never became very close, she said. The students were from all over the Capital Region so they really didn’t get together on the weekends to hang out, Mrs. Myers said.

This year, Myers is in the Voorheesville Key Club, and enjoys the activities with those students, working the concession stands, and participating in community events, like attending the fund-raiser to beat cancer, Relay for Life, Mrs. Myers said.
When asked if her daughter misses interacting with kids more on her own level — kids she can relate to — now that she’s in a more mainstream education plan, Mrs. Myers said, "Everyone has their own level"There are not a lot of kids with Down syndrome ." It’s more that there are many kids at different levels, she said.

Lewis said that Myers had missed a number of days of school the year before, but has wanted to come to school regularly since her return to Voorheesville, and has had a better attendance record.
"Everybody in town looks out for Lindsay," her mother said, including the hall monitors and bus drivers. "She does stick out," she said, and they all look for her and watch her.