Schooling options for those with special needs

Option 4- homeschooling: Possibly more AND less of what you need.

Homeschooling

               Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, homeschooling was an acceptable, but off the beaten path approach to educating your children. With the various concerns about group gatherings, teacher concerns and tax-supported requirements for access to certain resources, even many public school districts supported some form of complete or partial homeschooling for a period of time. While the merits of various school districts’ approaches can be debated another day, this certainly gave many families exposure to some of the many resources available for homeschoolers that the long-timers had been privy to for decades.

               Being a homeschooling family for many years, it is my observation that this is not for everyone. Even among those who are interested in doing this, there are varying opinions about how best to go about taking this on. Again, this is not a book devoted to the deeper details of homeschooling. Also, frankly, I am not even here to convince you one way or the other regarding your opinion, as a whole, about homeschooling. What I would like to do is prompting thinking about when this might be the right approach for you and your family.

               Speaking from my own experience, some of the best memories that I will ever have in my life stem from those years that I homeschooled. I was pretty familiar with  the process as I knew quite a number of people who did this. Looking back, I think I could not have done greater justice to a few of my kids than to give them the time, specific curriculum adaptations and one-on-one time that they needed to really take hold of the basics as there were some subtle learning disabilities at play. There is a very high chance that they would have struggled more in school later on or been judged poorly by their peers had they had not had those extra services that I was able to provide them.

               I would like to write some very clear pro and con list on the subject, but homeschooling really doesn’t lend itself to that. There are “goods” and “bads”, but how those are interpreted seem to rely heavily on one’s circumstances. So, I will plunge into the deep end and go about listing some considerations:

Very adaptable to the needs of most children, though novice homeschoolers will need to be mindful of how to address any area of lag or special needs.

It was a tired record to play to have some non-homeschool cluck about how the kids didn’t get enough social engagement, to which many a homeschool either laughs in their face or stares in disbelief. If the mother (sometime Dad, but usually Mom) is willing to put in the time, gas and hours on the road, the door to social exposure is wide open. However, it will take more effort and time and gas to make it happen.

If your child has communication disorder (be that hearing, neurologic or other), an anxiety disorder or very sensitive to sounds and activities, than the reduced social component is really a pro, not a con, but keep in mind that a) people are social creatures, so this element of their world will need to be addressed in some manner and b) one day your child must live in this world without you. Having a plan to specifically address their communication, anxiety or sound sensitivity issues should make it on the to do list of goals for the year, in my humble opinion. Therapists of different types, small classes (such as a swimming class or art class or homeschool co-op may all be viable options) and dealing with specialists or even blinged-out, noise canceling headphones may help. But to not address these issues does leave your child at a further disadvantage when you are no longer there to help.

               On that note, let’s just acknowledge that not all families are able to make this happen. The parents both have to work, the child has special needs that they don’t feel prepared to address at the academic level (there are plenty of other areas that the parents will be spending their time on to address their special needs), or, frankly, they have no experience, background or interest in doing so. That is perfectly fine. I would never recommend undertaking the enormous time and personal investment commitment that homeschooling requires if you feel bullied or guilted into doing so. No one will win under those circumstances.

               If you do choose to homeschool, which is the right decision for some, be mindful that this is a very mentally taxing experience for the teacher. The planning, teaching, grading, adapting usually happen at home, so there is often a blur between this and home responsibilities. Over time this can be quite taxing and difficult to see personal improvement over time. If you chose this path for a given year or more, I ask that you consider a plan that includes 1) balance and reprieve time for the teacher and 2) means of evaluating goals for the child, teacher and family, be they academic, personal, spiritual, physical. It is unpleasant to work so hard and see no change over the long haul because you are either too close to the issue or you never set a mile marker along the way.

Possible second story

As for how this played out for Little Miss, that is a whole different story. Our home was, quite literally, the dividing line between two school districts. The very far-distanced, but home district, that we will the Ridiculous School District, and the much closer, much better staffed and programmed district, that we will call the Recalcitrant School District are key to this story. For a myriad of reasons at a very difficult and personally harrowing season of my life, we felt it was time to put the kids in school, two of whom went to a public school and had a great experience, two of whom went to a private school and had an okay experience. Little Miss was only preschool age at that time. The public school would allow the older ones to “elect” into their school, which had to have the permission of the Ridiculous School District. As the older kids had no IEP or 504 needs, as well as no behavioral strikes against them, the Recalcitrant School District allowed it.

This was an ENTIRELY different story when it came to my daughter. She had clear and present needs and the district that my older kids had elected into were absolutely opposed to her having anything to do with them. I knew that since the beginning as she participated briefly in a support program run by the Public Health Department. They lamented with me that she would benefit from the Birth to three program through the Recalcitrant School District, but that they were known for being completely unyielding to any special needs outsiders. My other option was to put my almost non-verbal little girl on the school bus at 630am for the one hour drive to a distant small town, the Ridiculous School District that we belonged to, so that she could receive 45 to 60 minutes of services and then bussed back, hoping that no evil was perpetrated upon her in the almost empty bus on the way there or back, day after day. Makes me vomit just thinking about! Sometimes truth is sometimes worse than fiction, I’m afraid.

And keep in mind that I had been a nurse practitioner for about a decade at that point. Years before this all came about I had a 6 year old female patient in clinic with her completely bereft mother and another support person. The mother could hardly contain her horror when relaying the story that she had uncovered about the fact that her daughter had come to sit next to a boy on the school bus directly behind the school bus driver. This boy had placed his backpack “just so” to block the view of the school bus driver and been molesting this little girl for weeks before she eventually told her mother. This is the vision I carried in my mind when thinking of putting my basically non-verbal little darling on that 630am bus. Yes. That is what I was being asked to risk, 2 hours a day, 5 days a week. No accusations, just possibilities. No thank you.

I seethed and planned. I interviewed and reflected. I spoke to the therapists, director of special education, teachers, and the superintendent of the Recalcitrant School District. They all saw that my option in my home school district was revolting. Never would they allow that for their own child to alight the bus the way we were being asked to, but they would not even consider the prospect of her climbing onto the bus with her brothers to go to school in their district. Or to even have me take her there and pick her up. Or get therapies there, but not school. The options that I presented went on and on, but they never budged.  

The caveat is that the superintendent of the Recalcitrant School District didn’t directly say no. He could see the dilemma, knew my other kids were no problem in their district, so he would leave it to the Special Education Director, who I had already spoken to and who couldn’t say no fast enough. This superintendent, I grant, did give me the time of day, but the outcome was the same. He did me the courtesy of calling me personally to tell me that my request had been denied. On the verge of tears, yet again, I asked him what he would recommend. He paused, then suggested that I move out of my current district, which, again, was literally across the street from where I lived at the time. Even he could not recommend The Ridiculous School District option, knowing my child’s circumstances.  I know that he did not make that recommendation lightly.

The first private school that I placed her in was very small and closed their doors a short time later. Another very small private school had helped another special needs family I knew, so I met with the very new principal of the school. He was so kind, so compassionate, but could easily see that her academic and therapeutic needs were far beyond anything that his school would be able to make manifest. More tears, more empathy from the person in power, another recommendation to move.

So, in the end, I taught my daughter of low IQ how to read, how to use number line, how to sing. I took her to tutors, therapists, programs, sports clubs, giving her the best education that a very experienced, but very weary homeschool mother could provide her. My life changed in many ways since then and now we live elsewhere. She is in an even better school district than the Recalcitrant one, has friends, therapies, resource, DLC, sports. It mostly worked out “in the end”, but there was a great deal of suffered in the middle there and "the end” as not yet fully arrived.