My entire life I was in a Private School, from a Lutheran Preschool to Catholic Grade School and High School, so trying to navigate the Public School System is a little overwhelming to me, but add in a child with Special Needs and my anxiety is now through the roof!
One of the great things about our public school system is that Jackson should be eligible to receive an education at no cost and receive all his therapy services there. Sounds great, right? Wrong!
Jackson does not turn 3 until October, so we cannot enroll him in school until then, but open enrollment begins tomorrow for classes starting in August, so the odds are stacked against us on them having a full time spot still available in October. The next piece to that is if Jackson can get in to Part-Time, then we would still need child care for him the remainder of the days/times that he cannot be at his new school. The school would offer bus transportation to him if he was at a daycare in the district, but he isn’t, so to take advantage of that, we would have to find him a new daycare, which let’s be honest, spots are limited at a good place and to find one that can care for a special needs child is like finding a needle in a haystack and add to that it has to be within certain boundaries….forget it.
So, let me break this down….to enroll our son with Fragile X Syndrome in the Public School System for Preschool we must move him from his current daycare to a new one within the district’s boundaries, hope there is a spot for him 3 months after the school year begins or enroll him in part time days and have him shuttled back and forth between schools to get his services. How on earth does that help a child who already has crazy anxiety?!?! How does this help a child succeed and grow?
Now on top of figuring out what we need to do for Jackson we also wanted to move Carter at the same time, so to do that I need to go to open enrollment tomorrow night and sign Carter up, but we didn’t want them starting until the same time to avoid multiple drop-off’s in different directions. However, they bill one month ahead, so we would sign Carter up to start in October, but have to start paying in May to cover August, then September and finally October. So at that point, you might as well move him beginning in August to avoid paying at two schools, but what is the point if there is no guarantee his special needs brother, who should be able to benefit from the public school services cannot be enrolled yet?
This is just one of the hoops/red tape we have to go through. We are doing everything we can to help our children learn and grow, doing whatever we can to get Jackson all the resources he needs, but none of this is easy.
Spread awareness about another flawed system!
XOXO
Our Fragile Xperience 