Our third child has multiple disabilities, and attempting to compare our experience in both public and private settings is difficult; he had caring teachers in both settings who truly loved him and wanted him to succeed as much as possible.

Again, I realize that schools, children and teachers vary, and the following is just our family’s case.

The hardest part about special education when a child reaches age 3 is devising the IEP (Individual Education Plan.) By law, the plan is supposed to ensure the child receives a free, appropriate education based on needs according to disability. In reality, it sometimes turns into a “court case” from day one. If parents don’t know to send a request for evaluation via registered mail, the request is often “lost.” In our district, city and county children attended a self-contained, public preschool together. When our child entered the system, the city children who needed speech got it, but the county children did not. We were told that the county had not been able to locate a qualified speech therapist but were working on it. So, not wanting to make “enemies” from the beginning, we waited…and waited…and waited. Finally, we learned that perhaps it was a financial issue. The county district had less money for special ed than the city. Still, the school district was supposed to receive special ed funds for each child enrolled, and our child needed speech. It took a letter from a former speech therapist and communication that was “legally active” to get it done in less than two weeks. Voila! A speech teacher for the county kids!

The nicest part about public preschool was that I could leave my child there and trust the staff to know how to care for him. There were aides who could feed and handle him. They weren’t afraid of seizures, and volunteers were willing to learn everything and work with him one on one. He received both physical and occupational therapy and was part of circle activities. He progressed well in some areas such as the phenomenal task of learning how to get off a couch or out of bed without falling, but he mysteriously regressed in others, and the regressions only occurred in that setting.

For example, he could do simple tasks such as hold his own cup and drink from it. All along, I thought he was holding his cup until year-end evaluations gave him a zero. I knew I had shown the staff how he held his cup. Even his Sunday School teachers, who saw him just once a week, knew how to give him his cup. He also held his cup at the private preschool where he went twice a week. Turned out, either nobody at the preschool had ever tried to give him the cup, or if he dropped it, they just held it for him. And that, in the end, was a persistent problem. In a classroom where all the children had disabilities, and where he had some of the most severe disabilities, expectations were generally lower for him than in settings where all the other children were “normal.”

The low expectations carried over to discipline. Often, if he cried out, he was taken out of the classroom for lengthy periods. But at church and in private preschool, he was disciplined exactly like the other children. Timeouts were short, and he was taken back into class.

Speech is another area where he progressed better in a mainstream setting. While my “special child” has never been able to talk with any consistency, and he is considered nonverbal, his best “speech” occurred in settings with children who talked normally. As other children learned letter sounds in private preschool, he occasionally would make the letter sound before they would. He actually said a few words to identify objects he felt (he also has a visual impairment) such as “star,” or “ball.” Once, in Sunday School during a lesson about God’s creation in Genesis, he even uttered the word “God.” Another time, when some of the boys were acting out, and he was sitting quietly, he said, “bad.”

The private preschool experience was also good in that his teacher willingly followed his public preschool IEP and worked well with his vision specialist. Overall, we discovered that the best teachers of all – no matter what their educational background – were those who were willing, and we thank God for all those many teachers and aides (they are teachers too!) who willingly loved and taught our child. It truly takes caring, compassionate people to help these children work toward seemingly impossible goals, and for a child like ours, giving up on him would have been so much easier, because his progress was measured in “nanobites.”