Reply to School with smaller classes in NW DC or close in Maryland

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Regular public school can be hell for a child with sensory issues. It's incredibly loud and chaotic, from waiting in line to enter the classroom before school starts, recess and lunch to center time where all the kids in the room seem to be talking all at once.
For these children, an educational consultant once described it to me as going to school in a place where the fire alarms are ringing all the day.
OP, if your child's sensory issues are this severe I would make every effort possible to find a more comfortable place until he's old enough to handle the environment better. There was a boy at our school who had pretty severe sensory issues and every recess he would huddle in a corner with his hands over his ears, crying.

It was very difficult for the parents because I think he was doing well in many other ways, e.g. could handle the school work and had friends. The school would not provide any accommodations for recess and lunch unfortunately so he was stuck.[/quote]

This sounds just like my K son.  He was in PEP for 2 years.  Sadly he met the academic goals of MCPS Pre K and he lost his IEP heading into K.  Our local public has 23-25 kids and 1 teacher. It is the sheer number of human beings and the noise that they bring with them that shuts my kid down.  MCPS told me they had no way to accommodate his issues.  He's now in a private with a small class and doing very well.  It truly sucks that some kids just can't process the stimulation and there's nothing our public education system is willing to do about it.[/quote]

In an ideal world, what could MCPS have done?  I don't mean to be snarky - I'm genuinely curious about how a public school with finite resources per child could do a better job.  If you were the principal of your old school, what would you have done?  Created a stand-alone classroom for kids with sensory issues?  That runs into LRE issues, as well as the fact that kids with sensory issues are not always sensitive to the sensory issues of their peers.  Create a single, smaller, classroom in each grade?  I can imagine how that would go down with the rest of the parents.

I'm glad you could afford private, truly, but I'm not sure this is an issue of what the school is "willing to do about it" unless you can see how the school could have created a private school environment in public. [/quote]

The school system is required to provide a free and appropriate public education for all children.  If the child needs a small learning environment in order to access the curriculum like their non-disabled peers then the school system is required to provide that, even if it means paying for a private school placement. [/quote] Which goes back to the question of whether or not the child has an IEP. If not he needs to get one. If so it needs to be written into the IEP that the sensory issues need to be accommodated for with clear guidelines as to how the school will accommodate the child. [/quote]

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