A week before school started, and just after teachers and administrators went back to school we got a phone call. Our son who was an out of bounds student might not actually be able to attend the school he had been scheduled to attend due to the number of students registered for his grade. At issue was that there were to many students for the number of classes but not enough to form a new class.
The problem is that our son is autistic. When dealing with autistics, this type of move would normally require a month to a month and a half of transition work by the parents and the school was unable to give us a definitive answer till at least the end of the first week of school. This actually would have created a second issue as it would have meant him starting at one school and then moving to a second school in a relatively short period of time without the relevant necessary transition work.
So we look around. The reason my son had not originally gone to the school in our area was that it was over crowded and many students were being bussed to other schools while a new school was being built to handle the overflow from this school and another nearby school. This new school was opening for the first time this year as well so it would reduce the numbers of students at his designated school, so we decided to give it a try.
On a side issue there were two old schools affected and now would be three schools covering the north end of the city plus a portion of the rural area to the north of the city. Of these schools, on opening day at least two of the three were rapidly approaching capacity again, showing need for still another new school to service an extremely rapidly growing area of the city.
The issue that this will create though will be that the catchment areas for these schools are getting smaller and smaller. How do we protect our special needs students from being moved school to school to school when this is not usually in the best interests of the student. To give an idea of the complications involved in putting an autistic student in a new school we look at our situation. To hire a TA to cover my son the school needs permission from the special needs person for the district, Now because this is the first week of school he is not necessarily that easy to reach, because of the lateness of the notice that we were changing schools we are now looking at his initial transition meeting happening on Friday (hopefully). This meeting is his first opportunity to meet his teacher and TA and is done in conjunction with his resource team from the school and has to happen before he is able to go to school, otherwise we would be dumping a student who does not handle change into a situation where they are working one on one with a person who they have never had a chance to deal with on a non work situation.
We are crossing our fingers that this transition meeting goes well and he does adjust as well as he is sometimes able to do. However what we need to do now is make sure that this situation is not repeated in a year, or two or three when a new school is opened or we move across town for one reason or another. Because the issue is that according to the special needs person for the district, this type of situation involving an autistic person has not actually come up before. Now the necessity is to make sure that the protections are put in place that unless the family moves to a location that makes the parent transporting the child to the existing school unfeasible they, and their siblings, will be allowed to remain in the original school until the reach the highest grade level that they can reach at that school. We need to do this so that we do not end up doing more harm to another autistic child who may not be able to make this type of adjustment.
Hopefully in the near future this type of change can be made so that the children are given the best opportunity to grow and learn in a stable learning environment.
Leave a Reply