Hi Anee,

Your experiences in school caught my eye. My 7 year old son, who has
spastic quad cp, is halfway mainstreamed in first grade. We've been
unhappy with his school situation, for some of the reasons you allude
to in your post--specifically, that he is one of only 2 kids with cp
in the special education room. The other 6 kids have various forms of
autism or mental retardation. I volunteer in both classrooms frequently
(his first grade and his sped room), and have seen how impossible it
is to meet the needs of kids who have such a wide range of abilities and
disabilities. We feel he'd do better in a special ed room that had
other physically challenged kids only, not to mention how much more
efficient for the school to pool its resources in one room. I've asked
around and our school system does not pool kids like this. Your
experience in school sounds like what we'd like to give Takoda.

There are other reasons we're unhappy with the schools here--primarily,
they don't fund them well and the curriculum is not ambitious. Takoda's
twin, who is not disabled, suffers from this lowest-common-denominator
approach too. Both of our boys are clearly demonstrating that they're
capable of a more intellectually stimulating curriculum. Tennessee
ranks in the bottom 5 for educational quality for good reason. :(

Long story short, we're willing to relocate to a better school system just
about anywhere in the U.S. If anyone else would like to recommend a
particular area/school to look into, i.e., one where they actually
educate children, esp. ones with cp, PLEASE write me back. I'm collecting
a list of places to look into.

I've lurked on this list for quite some time now and have really enjoyed
the kick in the pants you give us parents, esp. in recent threads. :)
Thanks to everyone for their honesty and their willingness to talk about
very difficult issues. I keep saying I'll post an intro to this list,
but never get around to it so this will have to do for now. Feel free to
ask questions tho!

Thanks for your help,
-Michelle
  Mom to Caleff and Takoda, 7 y/o twins
  Knoxville, TN

On Thu, 16 Sep 1999 17:30:53 EDT, Anee said:
> We lived in fairfax county va near washington dc when I was in middle school.
>  I went to Holmes middle school which is a 1 floor school in near annandale
> and alaxandria va.  It is home to the countys physical disabilities
> department for middle schoolers.  I was mainstreemed there in the normal
> classes as I was throught school.  The diffrence was there were about 15 kids
> in the PD department who were mildly to severly  disabled.  Of these 13 of us
> had CP and of those 13, 4 of us were fully mainstreemed, and the rest
> partialy mainstreemed.  Since 13 of us had CP I learned alot about the
> diffrent affects of CP and how to overcome these.  This was probably the best
> school experience of my life because I learned so much about deversity (noth
> va is very diverse--we had signs in 6 languages at the school) and about
> disability and especially CP because of that concentrated CP population.
>
> Also when we lived in DC I volentered in the summers at a school for the
> severe and profoundly handicapped...these were more of the mental-physical
> type disabilities---very sever nurological dammage beyond diagnosis and
> autism and such. At the school I learned about feeding people, GI tubes,
> physical and occupational therapy teqniques, speech therapy tequniques etc.
>
> We then moved to Dallas texas area and that's were I went to high school.  I
> did not rally like high school because I was the only one with a physical
> disability, just like in elementry school.  There was one other girl in my
> high school who was partialy blind and we are good friends.  I got through it
> ok.  I can't say I would ever want to do it again thouh. :)


Michelle M. Law

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