traumatic flashbacks that further fueled Olivia’s social abandonment in what is considered
ordinary school time experience.
With Julia’s background grounded in academic research of the United States adoption
and foster care system, Julia immediately became aware that her daughter would not be able to
receive the attention needed to be cared for in attendance to the diversified ways the public
system could not comprehend or seem to equip. When Julia first offered to teach courses on
adoption and the foster care system to the public school’s administrators, teachers, and
counselors, the school administration rejected Julia’s offer, viewing Julia only as a mother and
not a scholar. Elaborating more on her experiences in dealing with the administration of the
public school, Julia sated:
I ended up having to pull in experts because they kept wanting to put her in special ed
because of the label. My experts were smarter than their experts, but that was an
additional expense that I didn’t need. On the other hand that also made me an enemy in
the school, so what I did after a year of struggling with that in the public schools is shift
her to a Catholic school were that wasn’t even available and she would be just one of the
kids in the classroom and that was perfect for her. (Interview, June 6, 2014).
It was evident to Julia that her expertise was not welcome and Julia could only exist
within a singular occupation, either as a mother or an academic. The exclusion in recognizing
Julia as a professional is perceived as a threat to the security, modes of production, and power in
how the administration exerted and structured their classrooms due to Julia’s persistence in
building an environment welcoming for Olivia. However, the ultimate authoritative figure is
Julia and her decision to move Olivia to a private school where both Julia and Olivia’s needs
were accessible and considered.
Conclusion
In writing this paper, I aimed to introduce the differences of why and how children are
labeled as special needs in the United States adoption and foster care system. Specifically
focusing on Olivia’s experiences with being labeled as special needs due to behavioral problems
and traumatic experiences as a result of living in foster care, I used themes of recognition and
tense to emphasize the post adoption encounters that Olivia confronted such as stigmatization
and lack of social recognition and acceptance. Julia’s experiences were incorporated to provide
additional analyses to the broader conversation of how systems of power not only suppress
Olivia’s identity but demonstrate how the same systems of power