[blindkid] Schools for the Blind vs. Education in Public SchoolSystems

[Tina Egle]

Hello Terri,

My heart goes out to you.  My son who is born totally blind now 13 years
old was the only blind student in the Educational life skills program. 
the same thing happened to him.  Some other special needs children can see
so they always ate his food and he is the skinniest because he got his
food stolen from his plate all the time.  The classroom assisstants do
nothing about it becase it will upset those other special needs students
so my son has to be targeted and suffered.  He is the sacrificial lamb. 
Now I had just found a vision program school where he will sit with other
blind students who all felt more comfortable hanging around with each
other since they understands their own limitations.  He did not get much
of education either because the last school which is our own school
district hired a clinical psychologist just to write down a psych eval
stating he is sever to profoundly mental retardation so they don't have to
teach him academically.  There is seriously something wrong with that
diagnosis since my own two clinical pediatrict neurop-shychologist did
genetic and behavior analysis which scores him a lot higher in the
intelligence testing so I knew I was on to prove that the district had
done some illegal and invalidted testing and sure enough several years
later I found a very good TVI and ONM speciatlist who saw the test names
and invalidated them, she also had to show up to his IEP to testify that
the test was so wrong.  The district now agrees to transport and transfer
him to another special school out of the district which is specialized in
vision program  and that school has 25 visually impaired students and he
will at least be with a  vision teacher as his regular classroom teacher
with 6 other 8th graders.  He will get vision services the entire day. 
But I did have to do my own homework as a mother , I found the assessor,
the school, the specialists to do their own test and pay for it myself,
after that 4 more major meetings then we got the results which we waited
for 10 years of his life.  Keep on fighting for your own rights.

Prayers for all disabled special needs children,
Tina    > My name is Terri Griffon. I will be attending my first
convention in ten
> days. I was educated in a public school system, but I wanted to go to a
> school for the blind as a teenager. I got academics at the public school,
> but I was the only blind student, and I was a target for a lot of
> nastiness
> by other students. They might say hi, but they would not talk to me if
> their
> friends were around. One girl ate part of my food and placed it back on my
> tray. When I inadvertently ate it, the whole table laughed.Other things
> happened, and by my sophomore year of high school I was considering
> suicide.
> I was very strong academically, so my parents and the district did not
> want
> to send me away to the school for the blind. This was in the mid to late
> eighties. Since the emphasis was on academics I did not get the mobility
> and
> daily living skills I would have gotten at the school for the blind. These
> would have been far more useful than some of the advanced academics. This
> is
> just one woman's opinion and experience.  I know many will disagree with
> me.
>
>
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Hi T