Disabled girl prevails in class despite odds

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When Brielle Hacker was born, she was so weak she couldn't even smile.

The future looked so bleak for the Rockville infant suffering from mitochondrial myopathy that doctors had given her only two years to live. And even if she did survive, they said, she wouldn't be able to walk or talk or understand her surroundings.

Brielle proved everyone wrong.

Tomorrow, she will celebrate her 10th birthday, and earlier this week the third-grader at College Gardens Elementary School played soccer, basketball, volleyball and competed against her classmates in a tug of war and the potato sack race.

"Doctors told me that my daughter would never walk or talk," said Julie Venners Yannes, Brielle's mother. "Now she has a vocabulary of 150 words and plays outside with the rest of her classmates on the playground."

A year ago, Brielle wore leg braces. "She reminded me of Forrest Gump because the leg braces were really holding her back and she virtually ran out of them," Mrs. Yannes said.

Brielle was born with the metabolic condition that, among other symptoms, can cause mental retardation, learning delays, severe muscle weakness, fatigue, inability to swallow food and gastrointestinal problems.

Brielle weighed 9 pounds when she was born and within a year she had gained less than 6 pounds. She was too weak to walk or crawl or stand. When she was 3, she could only lie on her back.

Mrs. Yannes attributes her daughter's improvements to her inclusion in a general education environment at College Gardens. Inclusion involves taking children with disabilities and immersing them into a regular education environment.

"There is a federal mandate to extend appropriate services to students with disabilities," said Kate Harrison, a spokeswoman for Montgomery County Public Schools.