In Memory of Kashawn

I was reading the thread on disruptive children in the classroom, and have been participating in the NCLB thread under politics -and in an incredibly sad twist of irony - just received word today that one of my
seventeen year old students had been shot in the head and killed in Durham, NC on Thursday night. I hadn't seen him in a year, because he had dropped out of school and I am in England at the moment.
My reaction is beyond simple sadness. And despite the fact that all signs pointed to this as the likely outcome of his life - I'm so angry that I can't even cry.
My first big tussle with the administration at my school was over this boy. He was young for his grade, had never been retained, though he could barely read and write, and was up for re-eval. I idealistically agreed that it should be done because I thought we were sincerely looking for fresh information that could help us make decisions about how best to help him. His IQ and achievement tests came back without the fifteen point discrepancy that would qualify him as LD and eligible for services. Although his IQ was low enough (70) for a supportive program, his adaptive behavior scale was too high to allow him to qualify. All services were withdrawn - he just didn't qualify I was told. I later recognized this as a pattern - when our special services administrator realized that we would be held accountable under NCLB for the performance of every single SS student, she decided that the affect of their failing score would be more easily diluted in the regular education population of l500 than in the SS population of l50. She began, rather ruthlessly, weeding out those who were least likely to pass, which were unfortunately, exactly those students who most needed the services. This happened to him in ninth grade at the beginning of highschool when he was facing subjects like biology and algebra with fourth grade reading and math levels. He hung in there for a year, I saw him at lunch and after school to try to help him on the side, but he eventually dropped out, got involved with a gang, and was shot point blank in the head and killed on Thursday night.
I know that people who read of him in the newspaper will think "Ahh, just another stupid, violent kid making the wrong choices, getting what he had coming to him. " But I want people to know they would be wrong. I knew him intimately, and he was a sweet, sad, confused boy who wanted to be able to read and write like everyone else and wished his life could be different. To me he was "Peanut" with an incredible smile. wit and charm - who didn't get the help he needed from the adults around him. He's one of the reasons why numbers, statistics, and results from standardized tests don't mean a thing to me.