Special needs students left out of Nevada school’s yearbook, mom says

Nevada yearbook excludes special needs students, mom says - The Washington Post

Mariela Azarpira opened her son’s crisp black yearbook and began turning its glossy pages with one question in her mind.

She also didn’t spot any of Samir’s close friends, who were all part of a program for students with disabilities at the Northwest Career and Technical Academy.

“It’s like he didn’t exist, not even his name,” Azarpira said. “Come on, you couldn’t mention them? You couldn’t give him a little corner?”

The next day, she cried as she checked the yearbook again, desperately hoping that she’d just missed something, that her eyes had tricked her. But still, she saw no photos of Samir.

Azarpira decided the school had “messed with the wrong mama bear” and wrote to a local news channel to bring attention to the omission, which she said “completely outcast” special needs students.

A Clark County School District spokesperson said in a statement that the yearbook typically features students in grades nine through 12. Officials are now “reviewing the yearbook layout for future years to consider the addition of members of the school community enrolled in pre or post-graduation programs on campus,” the spokesperson added.

Samir, who was born with hydrocephalus — a condition in which fluid builds up in the brain, graduated from a high school in California in 2019 before his family moved to Nevada in 2021.

That same year, he began attending the Northwest Career and Technical Academy. He is part of the federally funded Program Approach to Career Employment, known as PACE, which prepares high school graduates with disabilities for the workplace.

Samir quickly made friends in the program and rarely missed school, his mother said. Through PACE, he worked at a Goodwill store once a week, earning a certificate for completing a student-work program.

Samir will complete the program this summer. So when it came time to order a yearbook in the fall, Azarpira knew she needed to purchase one to commemorate her son’s final school year. She joked that she might’ve been the first mom to place a yearbook order after the email notification hit her inbox.

On May 19, Azarpira’s husband picked up the yearbook from their son’s school. When Azarpira realized Samir wasn’t in it, she hid the yearbook under a pile of papers at her desk. Samir loves seeing pictures, she said, and she didn’t want to upset him by telling him there are no photos of him or his friends.

“Honestly, it broke my heart,” Azarpira said.

Samir and his classmates participated in activities Azarpira figured would have been photographed for the yearbook: when they worked at Goodwill, when they delivered coffee to teachers from a cart they took to the classrooms, and when they learned how to prepare their own meals during cooking lessons.

The following day, she slipped the book out from her desk and again scoured its pages. The weight in her chest felt heavier as she turned each page without any mentions of them.

When she got to the end of the book that had every student’s name listed, she searched it again starting with the letter “A” for their last name, then the letter “S,” in case he’d been listed under Samir. She looked for his best friends’ names the same way, to no avail.

She later sent emails to school employees and contacted the news channel. The school offered to refund Azarpira if she returned the yearbook. She declined, saying the roughly $90 cost wasn’t the problem.

“I just want them to put all the kids equally,” Azarpira wrote in an email response, “they are students and part of the school.”

Though weeks have passed since she got the yearbook, Azarpira hasn’t let her son look through it.

Azarpira has no shortage of photos of Samir — she calls herself his “paparazzi.” There are photos of him and his siblings in white frames lining their home’s walls. There are also hundreds of pictures and videos of her son and his friends on her phone.

The photos she’s missing, though, are those from his last year of school.

“They took that away from me, those memories,” Azarpira said.

And though her son won’t have the chance to get another yearbook, she’s hopeful that the special education students who return next year will have “a different story.”

“You’re going to see that they’re going to be in there,” she said.