School Surprise

When Ian Blur entered Chester High School, his parents watched with bated breath.
They'd already held their son in middle school an extra year for fear that the transition to a bigger school with bigger kids might overwhelm him. Ian, a pink-cheeked 16-year-old, has Down syndrome, doesn't talk save a few words when pressed, and is shorter than most of his schoolmates.
At best, they hoped their son would be content at his new school. At worst, they feared he might lose ground.
What they did not anticipate was joy.
"You can barely stop the car in time for him to jump out and go to school," Tony Wyatt said, explaining that his son now has a more active social life than he did back when he was in high school. "He's basically got rock star status over at Fulton."
At the root of Ian's transformation is a group of Fulton students known as peer tutors.
They are, on one level, just students who serve as aides in Comprehensive Development Classes.
At Chester though, the role of peer tutor has taken on a certain level of prestige and the peer tutors have established a tradition of also befriending the special-needs students and hanging out with them outside of school.