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DENVER - Chase (pictured) was just 18 months old when he started speaking his first words and sentences to a stunned mom and dad.
"It started with him just loving books, picking up books and playing with them," Brett Perry, Chase's father, said. "Then he went into this fascination with numbers and letters."
Before they knew it, Chase was doing more than just looking at the letters. He was reading full words out loud, and then full sentences out loud. Mind you he wasn't even 2 years old.
"We were watching The Today Show one morning, and we heard about a baby who was 18 months and could read like it was some kind of miracle," Brett Perry said. "And we thought, 'Excuse me, we have a child with Down syndrome who's 18 months old and can read.'"
Chase, now 3, was born with Down syndrome. His parents didn't know about it until moments before his delivery at the hospital.
"We were totally shocked," Casey Perry, Chase's mother, said. "Confused. Sad. We felt like we had a huge loss because we had these dreams of having a typical child."
After reading many books, the Perrys knew Chase would not be a typical child. Then, Chase read his first book. Everything - their expectations, their dreams, their understanding of Down syndrome - was changed forever.
"In Chase's case, he's actually a model for his peers," Lenita Hartman, inclusion coordinator at the Fisher Early Learning Center at the University of Denver, said. "It's pretty unusual for a 3-year-old to be able to read, whether they have Down syndrome or not."
Hartman believes Chase's story is redefining many what many expectations and prior research works say about what a child with Down syndrome can do.
"I think it's pushing us as educators to dream big," Hartman said. "Big dreams. Dreams that are big enough for their children because we know literacy opens the door to so much more.
"There's a lot of research going on right now about how individuals with Down syndrome learn. One thing we know is many are good visual learners. Ultimately, that's very beneficial for individuals with Down syndrome to learn because it helps them improve other skills such as their speech and language abilities," Hartman said.
For Chase's parents, it gives them hope that he may one day be able to be less dependent on his parents, and more dependent on himself and his own abilities.
"I think it's to appreciate what you have and to make the most out of any situation," Brett Perry said. "He surprises us with thing we think are fantastic, and he surprises us with things that every kid does that we're not happy about!"
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From 9 TV news in Colorado:
