Reply to Call to Action: Help create a safe learning environment for medically fragile students

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "Call to Action: Help create a safe learning environment for medically fragile students"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I can't find the question, but someone asked how MCPS accommodated medically fragile children pre-covid.

The thing is the MCPS accommodates medically fragile children every day. Kids with tracheotomies, kids who had heart or lung transplants, kids with rare diseases that suppress their immune systems.

MCPS does that now, but it's also always done that.

What the OP is proposing however is just more than the school district can logistically provide.

The first challenge is that of finding a cohort of on-level or above-grade-level kids for a cohort. A lot of medically fragile kids have other challenges, often quite severe. Not every child with a tracheotomy or a g tube or a j tube or who uses a wheelchair also has intellectual disabilities, but many of them do because sometimes the visible stuff like the g tube is the result of invisible stuff like chromosomal abnormalities.

Those kids have their needs met rather well inside MCPS, which has always done a better job with the kids who need a ton of intervention than it has done with the fringe cases.

But OP's child doesn't sound like they fit in that basket. They are just immunosuppressed, like many other kids before and after COVID who the school district had to figure out how to serve. They would not be served in a classroom with many of the other medically fragile kids, because many of those kids are not diploma track.

So, what do you do with immunocompromised kids who need on-level education? In the past, that usually meant the parent of the impacted child speaking to the other parents at the beginning of the school year and explaining that their child was waiting on a new heart, or had a rare disease, and asking for support. Kids in that specific classroom might wipe down their desks more often, or the parents might be asked to be extra careful about sending their kid in with a sniffle.

The thing is, we actually have a system to deal with immunosuppressed children, but the OP doesn't think that's enough. At the end of the day, the number of typically developing kids whose only issue is a poor immune system, and whose parents are willing to pull them out of their neighborhood school, is probably not even enough to fill a grade level, and certainly not enough to fill a grade level in anything like reasonable busing distance.
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics