It's hard to find an athlete as exuberant as Caleb, who celebrates at the finish line of each of his races with a choreographed dance and high-fives for everyone. (Photo provided by the Prewitt family)
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – David Prewitt was worried.
His wife, Karen, wasn’t.
“He can do it,” she said.
Their son Caleb, 13 at the time, was participating in his first open-water swim, something he needed to conquer if he was going to complete his first triathlon.
One thing you need to know about Caleb: He has Down syndrome.
Another thing you need to know about Caleb: It has never held him back.
“When we came home (from the hospital) with Caleb, we said he’s not going to be your typical young man with Down syndrome. We’re going to push him, and so we've always tried to raise him as a typical child,” Karen said.
That meant chores around the house, being active in sports, attending school, and making friends inside and outside of the Down syndrome community.
“We kind of upped the ante when we got into sports,” Karen said.
She coaxed Caleb into running a 5K on Thanksgiving of 2020 by using the Couch to 5K app that gradually built up his endurance. Now, Caleb was training for a triathlon – a 300-meter open-water swim, a 12-mile bike ride, and a 5K race.
He had learned to ride a bike. He had swum in a pool plenty of times. But what concerned David was that Caleb, with assistance from a volunteer partner, was now swimming in a lake to see if he had the strength and stamina to finish that leg of the race.
Turns out, he did.
“He comes out of that water, and he's just laughing,” David said. “And I thought to myself, ‘You’ve got to change your attitude,’ because this kid can do things.”
***
Caleb is now 18. He has completed 119 races in the past five years. Included are 44 triathlons of various distances, five half-marathons, and two Spartan Races.
The Guinness Book of World Records recognizes Caleb, 16 at the time, as the youngest person with II2 (Intellectual Impairment, including those with Down syndrome) to run a half marathon (13.1 miles). Caleb’s goal is to add his name to that book again in October by becoming the youngest person with II2 to run a marathon (26.2 miles) when he and his mom run the Chicago Marathon.
Stephen Wright was Caleb’s partner during the early part of Caleb’s running career. He’s amazed at all Caleb has accomplished.
“I don't think people realize, most 14- 15-, 16-year-old kids aren't doing that,” he said. “So not only does he have things he's trying to overcome and prove he can do things, but most kids his age aren't doing the things he's doing. It’s incredible, because I wasn't doing that stuff at his age.”
***
Deb Rains is the assistant head of school at the North Florida School of Special Education (NFSSE) in Jacksonville, where Caleb attends on a Unique Abilities Scholarship managed by Step Up For Students.
Rains called Caleb the school’s “Mr. Mayor.”
“He’s so outgoing,” she said. “He’s friends with everybody.”
Caleb will enter the North Florida School of Special Education's transition program this year.
Rains said Caleb’s always-in-a-good-mood personality and can-do spirit come from the support he receives from Karen and David. More than a decade later, she vividly recalls her first meeting with them when they visited NFSSE to see about enrolling Caleb.
“I will never forget this. They came in and they had his mission statement,” Rains said.
It read:
“We built everything around that,” Karen said.
It is important to the Prewitts that Caleb has friends outside of school because, as is often the case when students graduate, friends from school scatter to live their own lives.
Caleb has friends from school. Luke, a classmate, is his best buddy. But Caleb has friends outside of school, too. He belongs to four running clubs. He has friends from Planet Fitness, where he works out, and friends from Happy Brew, a Jacksonville coffee house that sells Caleb’s homemade cookies. (More on that shortly.)
They want Caleb to have a job and be self-sufficient. He graduated in May from NFSSE and will enter the school’s transition program, where he will learn employment skills.
“We're very thankful for that,” David said. “He's got a lot of things that he can look forward to, because he's pretty well known in the community.”
Caleb is eager to hit the job market. He’d like to work at Happy Brew, Planet Fitness, or Publix. David, now retired, worked as a store manager for Publix. Caleb’s sister, Courtney Tyler, works in a Publix bakery.
He’s getting a jump this summer on a possible job at Happy Brew by attending NFSSE’s barista camp.
“As an organization, you have a mission statement and a vision statement, but to take that and place that intentionality on their son's life just showed me that they were not limiting him because of his disability,” Rains said.
“I was very impressed by that. There was a statement to not just me, the school, but to the community, that they expected nothing less from their son than they would their daughter, who's neurotypical.
“That just created the path for him. Since they didn't put any boundaries or limitations on Caleb, there was none for him to be impacted by.”
***
The mood surrounding a child born with Down syndrome isn’t positive, David said. Parents are informed of all the things their child won’t be able to do – ride a bike, run, swim, get a job.
“We were on a mission to prove them all wrong,” Karen said.
Along the way, Caleb has become a role model for the Down syndrome community. He has advocated at the state capital in Tallahassee for the expansion of what is now the Family Empowerment Scholarship for Students with Unique Abilities, which he receives. Karen has written newspaper op-ed columns and spoken to legislative committees in Tallahassee in support of the scholarship.
“If we didn’t have the scholarship, we would have had a tougher journey,” she said.
Caleb has more than 26,000 followers on Facebook and more than 44,000 followers on Instagram. Karen said parents comment on the posts, saying they have more confidence in their child’s abilities after seeing what Caleb has achieved.
Caleb has appeared on NBC’s “Today” show during a segment featuring children with unique abilities who cook or bake. Caleb bakes. Currently, he’s baking the cookies sold at Happy Brew.
It started during the COVID-19 pandemic when Caleb began helping his dad in the kitchen. That led to their cooking show, “Fridays at Four,” that were posted to Facebook. They were hugely popular.
Caleb and Stephen Wright stand on the podium after finishing the triathlon at the Special Olympics.
Now, Caleb bakes 20 dozen chocolate chip and sugar cookies a month and delivers them to Happy Brew. The sugar cookies are a hit.
“We can’t keep them on the shelf,” owner Amy Franks said.
Caleb’s “Mr. Mayor” personality is in full force when he visits the coffee shop, Franks said.
“He'll walk in, he'll immediately step behind the counter and start making a smoothie, or he'll hop on the point of sale, like he owns the place, and we just let him do his thing, like go for it,” Franks said. “His work ethic is incredible. He never stops.”
Caleb often wears a T-shirt bearing the slogan, “No Limits.” He wrote that on top of his mortarboard at graduation.
Running, cooking, working out at the gym, Caleb has yet to encounter a limit.
And he does it all with a smile.
“The joy inside of him is so meaningful for us,” Franks said.
***
In 2021, Stephen Wright volunteered to be a partner for a special needs athlete and was paired with Caleb for a triathlon in Sebring.
He remembers how excited Caleb was before the race, and how concerned he was about how Caleb would react to the competition, the crowd, the long swim, which is the first leg.
“There was one point (during the swim) where I turned around and he wasn't there, and I started panicking,” Wright said. “He was actually underwater, trying to tickle my feet. And I was like, ‘All right, man, I can see how the rest of this day is going to go.’ We got out of the water, and everyone cheered for him.”
The two were dead last when they transitioned from the bike ride to the run. At one point, Wright couldn’t see any other runners. He wondered if the race was over.
What he didn’t know was that at the finish line, the race director was rounding up the younger runners who were waiting for the awards presentation and told them to go to the finish line and cheer on this young man who was running his first triathlon.
David and Karen were among those waiting for Caleb.
“That finish line,” Karen said, “was one of the best experiences of my life.”
"War, huh, yeah
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing"
— Edwinn Starr, "War"
The District of Columbia Public School system has a troubled history with special education. In reviewing a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights study on the subject, footnote 4 on page 7 led to a data source in which DCPS stood out like a very sore thumb: disputes between families and the district over special education: In 2018-19, DCPS had a rate of special education due process complaints filed which stood at more than eight times the national average per 10,000 students with disabilities served:
This led me to wonder what more recent data, and to wonder about how the states of Arizona and Florida would compare to DC in that more recent information. A web of policy diffusion between the states of Arizona and Florida resulting in both states eventually adopting robust formula funded education savings account programs for students with disabilities. The process began in Florida in 1999, when Florida Senate President John McKay passed and Gov. Jeb Bush signed what became a statewide voucher program for students with disabilities. Under the federal IDEA legislation, parents had the right to sue school districts for failure to provide a free and appropriate education (FAPE) for a district-financed private school placement. The practical difficulties of financing such a suit, however, left it as an avenue mostly accessible to well-to-do families. Districts have long contended that they do not receive enough funding for special education.
The McKay Scholarship program turned both of these unfortunate facts on their heads: you no longer needed to file a lawsuit to access private schools. Moreover, McKay Scholarship-participating families were entitled only to the funding that districts have spent decades describing as inadequate. Access to private education for students with disabilities was delightfully democratized and a financial win-win developed for families and districts. Tens of thousands of special needs students participated in the program, and it spent many years as the largest school choice scholarship program in the country.
Over in Arizona, our education freedom Scooby-gang was determined to emulate Florida’s success. In 2005, Arizona lawmakers passed, and Gov. Janet Napolitano signed a voucher program for children with disabilities. The Arizona school district industrial lobbying complex sued the program, and in 2009 the Arizona Supreme Court struck it down as violating the Blaine Amendment in Arizona’s Constitution. The Arizona Blaine Amendment forbade aid to “private or religious schools.” Dan Lips had proposed an account-based choice program in a paper for the Goldwater Institute, and the lightbulb moment happened: an account-based program with the option not to spend money at private and religious schools would be meaningfully different than a voucher program as pertaining to constitutional issues, among other advantages. Firing up our school choice Mystery Machine, we passed the first ESA program in 2011 and survived court challenges. Our compatriots in Florida became the second state to pass an ESA program for students with disabilities in 2015, and the ESA and McKay programs were eventually merged into a single ESA program.
How could this help DCPS and their never-ending cycle of special education conflict? Below is that more recent special education conflict data I referred to, and the rate of various conflict measures per 10,000 students with disabilities are displayed for Arizona, DCPS and Florida.
DCPS should not wait on the federal Olympians to look down from their perch on Capitol Hill to impose such a peace settlement on DCPS and the families it is constantly at war with. DCPS should settle this peace themselves as fast as possible by creating a robust ESA program for students with disabilities. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. Someday DCPS will join us in this humane and beneficial policy and give peace a chance.
Statewide races: Republican Ron DeSantis, who strongly backs school choice, wants 80 percent of all education spending directed into the classroom and pledges to expand the state's K-12 scholarship programs and career and technical education opportunities, narrowly wins the governor's race over Democrat Andrew Gillum. In other statewide races, Gov. Rick Scott defeats incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, Republicans win all three Cabinet seats, and 11 of the 12 constitutional amendments are approved with the required 60 percent majority. Associated Press. Politico Florida. Orlando Sentinel. The 74.
Tax initiatives: Voters approve all eight tax increases for education in the state. Sales tax hikes for construction and repairs of schools pass or are renewed in Alachua, Hillsborough, Lee, Martin and Polk counties. In Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Charlotte counties, voters approve higher property taxes to pay for school safety and teacher salaries. Politico Florida. (more…)
Florida's school voucher program for special needs students is constitutional. If the state Supreme Court entertains arguments to the contrary, it will create an unnecessary "legal cloud" for thousands of families.
That's the argument lawyers defending the McKay Scholarship program made in court papers filed this week.
Late last year, a state court of appeal rejected a lawsuit that took aim at 20 years of Florida education policy and argued the state had systematically underfunded public schools. The plaintiffs in that case want the high court to hear their appeal.
The lawsuit also contended McKay Scholarships, vouchers that help the families roughly 30,000 special-needs children pay private school tuition, are unconstitutional. It's the last surviving legal attack on a Florida private school choice program after courts declined to hear lawsuits targeting tax credit scholarships
When the First District Court of Appeal upheld McKay Scholarships, it cited, of all things, a lawsuit that struck down a voucher program in 2006.
In that case, known as Bush v. Holmes, the Florida Supreme Court ruled the Opportunity Scholarship Program created an unconstitutional, "parallel" public education system. That's because the program allowed a theoretically unlimited number of students in low-performing public schools to take taxpayer money and attend private schools instead. (more…)
Charter district: The Jefferson County School Board agrees to turn over operations of the district's struggling schools to the charter school company Somerset Academy. The proposed deal will be taken to the Florida Board of Education today for approval. If the deal is approved, Jefferson would become the first charter district in the state. In its application, Somerset said it will operate an elementary, middle and high school on a single campus led by a single principal, bring in a rigorous curriculum, including Advanced Placement classes, pay teachers 7 percent more than they can get in surrounding counties, pay competitive benefits, and work to bring students attending the alternative school back into the traditional schools. redefinED. WFSU.
Testing debate: The debate over the state's standardized testing intensifies at a Senate Education Committee meeting Tuesday. Supporters of former Gov. Jeb Bush are backing a moderate revision of the current system, while others want more significant changes, including fewer tests. Sen. Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, who is leading the committee in the medical absence of Chairwoman Dorothy Hukill, R-Port Orange, said no decision has been made on what direction the bills will take, and that Hukill will make that call. News Service of Florida.
Help for home-schoolers: Students who are home-schooled would have greater access to college classes and career education courses offered by school districts in a bill approved by the House PreK-12 Innovation Subcommittee. Districts also would be required to accept home-education registrations as long as parents and their children meet the state's requirements. redefinED.
Religious expression bill: The Florida Senate moves the so-called "religious expression" bill to a third and final reading. If approved, the bill would be sent to the House, which has a slightly different version. The bill would give students more freedom to express religious thoughts in public schools. Gradebook. News Service of Florida. (more…)
