Reply to Feedback on Little Buds preschool or PEP Classic for HFA 3 yr old?

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Reply to "Feedback on Little Buds preschool or PEP Classic for HFA 3 yr old?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP here-thank you for the suggestions! I visited Little Buds on Friday and I had a similar reaction as the previous poster. The facility was small and there was no playground. I saw some upbeat aides but some looked tired and unhappy. I am a novice with the ABA but I don’t understand how this will be helpful if my kid has major sensory issues that cause anxiety. The director was saying that the sensory issues get resolved when they control the external environment but my mommy instinct/understanding of sensory processing issues doesn’t agree with this. I am going to pursue ABA at a preschool instead of Little Buds.(If he doesn’t get the diagnosis next month at KKI then we can’t do ABA anyway because we need the diagnosis to get it covered).

Thanks also for the Karasik suggestion. I looked into this two years ago for my son but I was put off by the large class sizes and the director was so difficult to get in touch with. I had to call Sharon repeatedly and email too for weeks before I could get a response. Also at the time we were looking at the afternoon and the PEP model was in flux for the afternoon and she wouldn’t follow up with me after several attempts to get clarity about the PEP. I did call her last week and she hasn’t called me back but I am certainly willing to give it another shot. My son needs a really small class size given his anxiety. Do you happen to know if the twos class is smaller?

I am going to tour Geneva soon as I learned their afternoon twos class has 4-6 kids and two teachers. Amazing! I have heard they are very willing to work with special needs students and have allowedPEP itinerant and an ABA aide in the classroom. I am also touring Potomac Glen Day School too.[/quote]

7:50 on 4/25 here.

As to the class sizes, there are 20 students in the class and generally about 3 teachers at 3 years old.  I was VERY hesitant about the class size because my child has also had major anxiety issues (we're talking 2.5 hour full-blown anxiety attacks getting ready to go to a prior preschool because he didn't want to go).  I also hear you about the directors being very difficult to get in touch with and getting answers that always make sense prior to being in the program.  We almost didn't send our child to Karasik for that very reason.

Sharon H becomes a lot easier to get in touch with after your child is in the program.  She is hands-on with the children, has been great to me while I've been a parent there, and I get straight-forward answers now.  Continue calling and emailing, or if you have a friend at Karasik, have your friend visit Sharon H in her office to tell her to get back in contact with you.  I have a feeling that she's difficult to reach because she gets a lot of inquiries about the program and she does both intake and running day-to-day operations.  It's a lot of work and her focus is more on the day-to-day operations side.

I was told by my child's MCITP team and my child's PEP team after our transfer to Child Find, that it's not the size of the classroom that matters, but the way the teachers handle the classrooms that matter.  At this point, I wholeheartedly agree with that and Karasik finds the most highly-qualified educators for these children.  I believe that the head teacher of every classroom has a minimum of a bachelor's in early childhood education and that the assistants have a degree in education or be working toward one.  People who they hire who do not meet their very high standards do not stay there very long.  I have never once seen something that has concerned me with the way the staff interacts with the children and there are multiple children with various levels of needs in every classroom.  That is not something I can say for the other private preschools where I've had children attend.

As for the PEP side, I don't know what has gone on behind the scenes, but it seems like MCPS and Karasik didn't fully work out the PEP expectations for a couple of years.  I haven't heard anything like that this year, and Karasik now has a multiple-person PEP team on-site everyday.  In the mornings, the teacher and one or two paraeducators (I wish I paid more attention to this, honestly) provide all the individual special education hours to students by pushing into their regular classroom.  The speech therapist is there at least two days per week for either small-group (2 or 3 children), individual, or push-in speech therapy, according to each child's needs.  I don't when OT or PT happen or how they work because MCPS has never given us those services.  The 4-year-olds (and maybe 3-year-olds?) in PEP and the Head Start program  have 1.5 hours 3 days/week during nap time of additional preschool group time with the special education teacher and the paraeducators in addition to their IEP hours.  During this time, they read social stories and discuss how they can achieve the desired outcome themselves and try to act things out.

I've never done ABA with my child.  It seems really harsh to me.  What we though our child needed was a consistent schedule of full-day school that is fully-structured with educators who know what they're doing.  We wanted the teachers to watch the children during free play and encourage them to play with friends and a wide variety of toys, and not just look at their phones while children run rampant.  We were also willing to make mistakes along the way and pull our child out of an environment we weren't happy with (as we did with two preschools prior to Karasik).  We also expected to see results, and we have seen them with abundance.

If Karasik has space, I would try it.  You won't have MCPS over the summer anyway, and while they say their summer program is "less structured," it's much more structured than you'll find anywhere else.  Your child is going to be expensive, and if Karasik works, you're paying less than you would ever pay for loads of therapies.  If it doesn't work, it's just a little bit of money you would have spent on therapies that didn't work.  As an added bonus, if you get a diagnosis, you can get into the LISS lottery and possibly get $2,000 toward daycare (any daycare actually).  That $2,000 savings is great when you get it.[/quote]

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