[blindkid] LRE~School Choice
Richard Holloway
rholloway at gopbc.org
Thu Oct 29 21:32:56 UTC 2009
Sue,
That sounds like a thing to look into, but it is definitely not
universal-- In our county, they are REQUIRED to work with private
schools only until age 5 as I recall. After that, it is all at their
discretion. I think it works that way everywhere to some degree--
beyond somewhere around age 5 (maybe it is the end of the school year
when the child turns 5?), the school districts set their own policies.
I have heard some quick to argue that counties legally "must" support
kids in the community in public schools at older ages as well. Well,
(at least when we looked into this a couple of years ago for our
schools) that is true and it isn't. They ARE required to spend (or
have available to spend) a certain number of hours or dollars (I
cannot recall which) on services for private or home-schooled kids,
BUT the requirement doesn't mandate the distribution of funds be in
anyway related to the distribution of special needs in the community
or that services for any particular special need such as braille or
O&M needs be offered at all.
In our county and others nearby, speech therapy is a popular favorite
and the bulk of funds are directed towards that. It is pretty easy to
offer-- the student sees the therapist away from other classes and the
therapy is not very closely related to particular course material. It
doesn't effect PE or field trips or walking from class to class. It is
similar for a lot of children. It covers a lot more kids who have some
sort of need. In short, it is a convenient way to meet the mandate.
Other services are offered only on a case by case basis and can pretty
much be withdrawn at the county's discretion. Staffing and workload
are likely to strongly effect a school's ability to offer it. I
suspect they'd follow through for an entire school year once they
offer to work with you and written an IEP (if they were to) but each
following year would be an unknown.
Also, as far as services like a para-professional to assist with
classroom needs-- I would not anticipate that happening at all (not
from the county). Most private schools are going to quickly discover
that it is very expensive to provide additional staffing and other
equipment support needs for vision impaired children and I suspect
that they would keep additional support hours offered (if any were
indeed to be offered) a bit on the low side. Likewise, they aren't
going to have funding to educate and support staff in working with
blind kids-- it just tends to get very messy. Unfortunately, vision
issues tend to require some sort of intervention for most every
subject in school and the number of hours involved to solve all the
problems is really just cost prohibitive for the whole private school
model.
Because of all the logistical and support issues, I really suspect
that very few children go beyond the first few years before moving
toward public school options. If others have gone clear through
private school I'd like to learn more about the details-- I'll bet it
was very complex!
Richard
On Oct 29, 2009, at 3:41 PM, Susan Harper wrote:
> When I worked at the Catholic School, they worked with the public
> school and
> the public school provided the services there with an IEP. I don't
> know if
> this was unique to our town or was a state wide kind of thing. It
> is worth
> checking into, if Addison is enjoying success at the Catholic
> School. It is
> worth checking into.
> Blessings,
> Sue H.
>
> On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 1:16 PM, Stacy Lemmon <slemmonrn at spotlight-music.com
>> wrote:
>
>> I need some more input. We are re-opening Adison's IEP next week.
>> As I
>> have previously said, she is currently in a Catholic school within
>> our
>> school district with NO in school support....I have become the PCA,
>> AV tech,
>> the works. Likely, we will need to transfer to the public school
>> in order
>> to gain adequate services. The public school she would attend is
>> very
>> large, about 950+ kids. Plus they must travel approx 2 blocks to the
>> playground for recess. We have lived here for nearly 7 years and have
>> watched these kids go daily to the playground. It is utter chaos. 2
>> teachers
>> often for 50-75 kids. I have great concern over this. Adison is
>> small (34#)
>> and has low vision...I have visions of her getting chucked under
>> someone's
>> vehicle. Can I say, fine, we'll transfer to the public school
>> system...if
>> we can send her to 1 of the 2 other smaller (500-600) kids within the
>> district? Has anyone had any experience with this?
>>
>> Thank you again!!
>> Stacy
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