Special Needs and Public School

My son Benjamin who will be 21 in September just finished school ... like ... forever!! HEEELP!!

It is OK. We have wonderful plans for him, which I will talk about options for in another post. I want to talk about his school experience and how public school works with special needs in this post.

Now, there are many students who fall under the label special needs. I am restricting my comments to the special needs that I know and understand a little bit about, which is developmentally disabled students, students with mental health issues, and perhaps a little bit less, physically disabled. My son encompasses a little bit of all three. He has Down syndrome, he has obsessive compulsive disorder, and he also has chronic health issues, though they do not prevent him from being ambulatory.

Now, I homeschooled Benjamin till he was 10, partly because I homeschooled my other chidren (initially because of Ben's health) but also because he spent his first seven years with significant health problems that led to scores of hospitalizations with infectious diseases, and also to scores of surgeries.

At age 10 he presented as pretty healthy and also as utterly bored with homeschooling. I had his three older siblings who were reading Shakespeare, doing algebra, and working on their Latin verbs, and Ben, while the other kids took turns teaching him math, reading, and writing, was bored enough one day to take a red sharpie marker and mark off our entire main floor bathroom (walls, doors, tub, commode, sink, and mirror) with little red tic marks -- thousands of them.  Add to that another day where he tried to see how much dog food he could flush down the commode in one flush -- the next thing he knew, public school was on his daily schedule.

We started him in fourth grade at the local elementary school. 

The school was more or less flabbergasted to get him enrolled. They clearly rolled their eyes at first, wondering why this mom shows up with a kiddo of age 10, and I think they expected he had no skills and that he would have suffered academically from utter neglect. (Perhaps they had experienced kids coming in like that in the past.)

At any rate, we had a series of meetings and established what services Benjamin would benefit from in terms of speech, physical therapy, occupational therapy, hearing impaired services. The teacher was a young enthusiastic woman with a sunny bright smile and a large heart. Ben instantly took to her, and for two years we walked him back and forth to elementary school.

He loved the activities and attention and other kids at school so much that the week after he started school, on a Saturday, we were woken up by the doorbell ringing. Outside stood a 10 year old girl holding Ben's hand. Apparently Ben had gotten up, decided it was time for school, walked over there and nobody had been there. This girl had been out, she knew Ben from class, so she walked him home. -- 

And so we had to have the talk about what it means that "it is Saturday." -- Local school keeps kids like Ben safe because everyone in the neighborhood knows him, and the few times he has been lost, people already knew him and walked him home. 


I won't detail all of Ben's years in school, but I will mention that as he grew into his teen years and became 'less cute' and more suspected as a growing-larger teen boy, while his heart was still with the 6 year olds on the playground, the one singular place outside home where he was unconditionally accepted was in the public schools he attended. Always welcomed enthusiastically by teachers, para-professionals, other students with special needs, as well as by regular students at the school. 

It is thanks to public school teachers who worked hard to connect us parents (via monthly Saturday morning breakfasts and occasional dinners associated with school plays) with other parents that I even after Ben is out of school have a strong parent support network consisting of two different groups that meet monthly. It is thanks to those teachers and that community at school that Ben fostered friendships outside the special needs classroom with students who were his regular lunch buddies in his "circle of friends", students he is still in touch with, students whose parents are still my friends. 

But more than that, public school helped Ben in so many ways. Apart from just helping him learn to read and write (on top of what my daughter achieved in homeschooling), having amazing math programs that Ben just adored (he still works through 1st and 2nd grade mathbooks just for fun in his spare time), in addition to the hearing impaired support, the PT, the OT, the speech therapy that helped us get him an excellent communication device, in addition to all this, school helped Ben

1. work well and hard in projects he was capable of contributing to

• greeting card making
• setting up and taking down dinners for school staff
• landscaping
• paper shredding
• food teams (sandwich making, cookie making -- hygienically!!)
• walking dogs for Humane society

2. School got Ben out in the community on a weekly basis, exposing the community to these students in a positive well regulated way, and helping our special needs students be active and confident in the community

• museums
• zoos 
• bowling
• parks and recreation centers
• grocery shopping
• restaurants
• Christmas shopping for parents and siblings

3. School has helped Ben regulate his emotions when he gets anxious not only by therapy and psychological intervention but by working with me, finding a strategy for de-escalation, and for giving Ben simple coping mechanisms (safe place, coloring activity, etc) that help him get through his day with a minimum of emotional upset, and a maximum of functional hours.

4. School has also accepted Ben in spite of his deficiencies, his flaws, and his -- let's face it -- utter lack of value in a free-market competitive economy. Public school has that attribute that it MUST accept all students, and it has welcomed Ben, worked within the federal law regarding special needs, and done a world of good for my son.

Is it perfect? No! I do have friends who are parents of students with special needs who have not gotten from the schools what they had hoped for their students. I will not discuss their cares here, since they are not mine.

My hope with school for Ben was that he would find a community where he could learn and grow, where he was accepted, and where he would enjoy being.

Same hope I have now for the new adult programs that Ben is going to be in starting June 1st. I want him learning, growing, accepted, and happy. If he can, as I hope he will, hold down some part time (paid or unpaid) employment with group support, that too, I hope is in his future for a few hours per week. (He calls it his new school, and that is the highest compliment Ben can bestow on anything).

In conclusion, I cannot say enough good about all the ways in which Ben was affirmed and loved by super-energetic teachers who personally cared for him and his (sometimes difficult) emotional and academic well being.  And it takes quite a person (or two) to teach those who are not only developmentally and cognitively challenged, but who, as is the case with my son, also has a mental health component that can totally lock him up and have him stuck, impossible to deal with because of his anxiety and inability to move onto the next task. 

School to Ben has not ever been 'a chore', nor was it ever something he wished would go away so he can go into summer vacation. On the contrary, he has always dreaded summer and wished it away so he could get back to school, where he is loved, affirmed, challenged, employed in meaningful activity -- where he is among friends, peers, and professionals who honestly care for him and want to be with him --- unlike, for example, church, which is a mixed bag where some accept him (bless them!!) some avoid him, and some actively can be frustrated with who he is, what he does (or what I let him do) even if they try not to mention it too much. 

Not so with school. In high school Ben  has marched triumphantly through the hallways during breaks or lunch, getting multiple HIGH FIVES or fist bumps from scores of students, most of whom are pleased to give him 5 seconds of their time, students who may not all achieve so highly themselves, but who thanks to integrated high schools have been blessed with the smiley presence of my son Ben daily. 

Our public schools serve ALL students of ALL needs, and I think this is an important point to make. In many cases there is no other place for them. The more severe and specialized the special needs, the less likely that the needs can be met at a private or a charter school. 

During the 2013-14 school year, 6.5 million students—13 percent of the public-school population—received an IEP.

Some things may be able to be run better when they are run by business men or in a business manner with competition in the marketplace, but special needs are not one of them. Special needs COST us, the tax payers, but it is what we do because we care about each other and we care that each and every citizen (rich or poor) finds a meaningful place in our society.

 "(S)pecial-education programs are costly and provide few tangible benefits for school districts. School districts are rewarded for giving high-achieving kids ... Good students raise test scores, increase the ranking of the school, and keep property values high. Special-education students are red marks on the ledger."

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/01/is-the-bar-too-low-for-special-education/514241/