Homeschooling the J-Rex was never something I had planned on doing. I was educated in the public school system and that is what I had planned for my daughter:
During Pre-K with the Head Start program, the J-Rex had an amazing vision teacher and was thriving in an integrated classroom for half of the day and a special needs classroom for the other half. She had friends, was happy, was learning, and, while a bit rambunctious, was a well-behaved and helpful student.
When we moved to a new city for what would have been the J-Rex's final year of Pre-K, though, we were immediately overwhelmed by something we hadn't faced before: discrimination against our child's "hidden" disability. We were told our child was not disabled enough to be in either the vision classroom or an inclusion classroom, leaving the J-Rex faced with a visually-cluttered, chaotic, loud mainstream classroom with over 30 kids to one teacher. The vision teacher assigned to the J-Rex was clearly overworked and burnt-out, refusing to give our child more than a small fraction of the vision instruction she had previously been receiving and doing nothing to prepare or instruct her teachers in having a visually impaired child in the classroom.
Immediately, we began receiving calls from the school for behavoir that we had never encountered before, at school or at home. It turned out that the teachers were refusing to adapt any of the materials or assignments, even when the J-Rex was requesting it, which was causing her to have meltdowns and outbursts. The J-Rex's poor depth perception (resulting in her having some issues understanding personal space) was often misinterpreted as violent behavior on her part and the response of school personnel to these incidents was completely out of line, to say the least.
In the end, these problems resulted in the J-Rex receiving a horribly inadequate IEP and being shuttled from classroom to classroom until finally receiving a completely inappropriate placement - one that we were forced into accepting under threat of her being expelled.* We knew something had to be done but I was still determined to fight for a re-evaluation of her IEP and was still looking at school-based options (just not that school system).
As a result, just before first grade, we headed to Texas to move near family and the School for the Blind, where we hoped to enroll the J-Rex as soon as possible. We had heard from other parents of low-vision children how much of a positive difference being with other children with similar impairments could make. Unfortunately, though, due to an issue securing housing, we ended up back in Georgia at the beginning of the school year.
We tried to get the J-Rex back in school again right away, hoping the new district would at least be better than the last. The process took forever, though, as we were made to wait for weeks to even hear back from the special education people in the district we had moved into.
By the time I did receive a call from the school system, I was already homeschooling the J-Rex and the new district said they wouldn't even consider changing the previous IEP and placement until after a trail period of several months. At this point, the J-Rex had not had a stable classroom since she was four years old, having moved districts or simply been shuttled between placements within a district at least once every year since then. She needed some stability...and we needed to void that old IEP, so we could start again based on her disability and assessments alone rather than information from a school district that had terribly mistreated her...
Those reasons, and those reasons alone, are why I have been homeschooling the J-Rex. I was never sure I could do as good of a job teaching her as I would like, nor was I ever sure of the benefits of putting her in as isolated a setting as an only-child homeschool (with an introverted parent) is, but I knew that, at the time, I could and would certainly do a better job for her than had been done in the past couple of years in the school system.
(To be continued...)
*As I know it will be an inevitable question: Yes, we did look into getting an advocate, but none in our area were willing to even speak to us without a $300 deposit and we did not have that kind of money to spare. We went through every legal and formal route available to us that did not require a large outlay of money and still ended up being bullied into accepting only what the district was willing to do rather than what our child needed. They retaliated against our child, lied to us, and, quite simply, walked all over us because they knew we could not afford a lawyer. Unfortunately, this is an all too common experience among the parents of special needs children in the public school system.
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