Thirty years ago,\u00a0 children with disabilities were not guaranteed education in public schools.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My state had residential schools in the state capital for deaf children and for blind children, but nothing for children who had other disabilities.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I remember the mother of a childhood friend fighting with the school board so her daughter–with severe hearing impairment–could attend regular classes.\u00a0\u00a0 (Her daughter is now a professor of chemistry.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If they weren’t institutionalized,\u00a0 disabled children were home-schooled, usually by tutors, like Helen Keller.<\/p>\n
But now that federal law requires schools to educate all children, why would a parent choose homeschooling?\u00a0 And why are the advantages–and challenges–of doing so?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Here are some things to think about, from someone who did it.<\/p>\n
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Why consider (or commit to) homeschooling?\u00a0\u00a0 The needs of the child, the resources of the school, and the resources\u00a0 of the parent(s) should all be part of the equation.<\/p>\n
School:\u00a0 What special-ed resources does the school have; what financial resources does it have to expand existing services if necessary.\u00a0 We live in a very small town (smaller twenty years ago.)\u00a0 All spec-ed services (speech therapy, occupational therapy, etc) were provided through a county special-ed co-op for all the small schools in the county.\u00a0 This meant a maximum of 30 minutes of speech therapy a week.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And a first-grade teacher whose most one question for me was “Will he sit still and be quiet?”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A barely-verbal child does not need to spend all but 30 minutes a week being quiet…the point was to increase his verbal ability, not squash it.\u00a0\u00a0 At the end of that meeting, the county special-education-co-op coordinator took me aside and said “Have you considered home-schooling?”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If, on the other hand, a school district has the resources to provide what the child needs, then public school attendance may well be preferable.\u00a0 Years later, we transitioned our son into public high school, which he (and the school) both enjoyed–both the child and the school had additional competency by then.<\/p>\n
Child’s needs:\u00a0 If the child\u00a0 has needs the school cannot meet\u00a0 (not just is unwilling to meet, but cannot meet) then for the child’s own good another solution is necessary.\u00a0\u00a0 I knew that suing the school district to force compliance with federal law would not work, because (having been in city government here) I knew what the tax base was, and wasn’t.\u00a0\u00a0 There was no wiggle room in the budget,\u00a0 and–in the political climate in this state–no additional funding was going to appear to make it possible fast enough to provide a program suitable for our son.\u00a0\u00a0 Nor, when I talked to therapy professionals, was there a school district within a hundred miles that had what they felt he needed.\u00a0\u00a0 Nor a private school (even if we could have afforded a private school, which we couldn’t.)<\/p>\n
Parent resources:\u00a0\u00a0 My background for teaching included multiple college degrees,\u00a0 long experience working with children (from babysitting and church nursery duties as a teenager, through tutoring junior high and high school students while in grad school, to volunteer teaching in the local school system, where I had designed and taught a course on emergency response. )\u00a0\u00a0 From tutoring, I’d developed flexibility in teaching–adapting to each of my very different students.\u00a0\u00a0 I knew how to set up a curriculum, how to assess progress (including in nonstandard ways), how to make up my own teaching materials, etc.\u00a0\u00a0 I was already doing a lot of our son’s therapy, since we could not afford to go to the medical center very often or hire therapists to come to us.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I knew I could teach, and I knew I could teach\u00a0 this particular child: we had already accomplished things that proved it.<\/p>\n
So, in our situation, homeschooling made excellent sense:\u00a0 I had the knowledge and skills and will to teach; I could provide both structure and the flexibility the school could not.\u00a0\u00a0 When we transitioned him into public high school, the school expressed amazement that he adjusted so easily and was so easy to get along with–that was no accident, but a deliberate plan from the day I started homeschooling (it just took longer to get to that point than I’d hoped.)<\/p>\n
Some people worry that homeschooled children don’t get any socialization.\u00a0\u00a0 Fact is, some kids in special ed do not get good socialization either.\u00a0\u00a0 Socialization requires that the child be capable of what is asked, and that the other children involved are both capable of, and guided to, healthy social interactions.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s often easier to socialize a child out of the classroom, where the demand can be titrated to the child’s growing competence.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Homeschooling does not mean locking a child into the house with one adult all day every day–it means being able to go out into the world at times that work *for that child* (not for a school operating on a set schedule every day.)<\/p>\n
Our son had many developmental delays–physical, mental, social-emotional–and homeschooling allowed us to work where he was…often a little advanced in math concepts, always considerably behind in language and social-emotional.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As a former tutor who had dealt with the results of spotty learning in neuro-typical kids, I knew that solid learning was more important than fast learning.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Better to be two years behind but know and understand the concepts thoroughly than supposedly at “age\/grade level” with holes in the learning that would cause problems later on.\u00a0\u00a0 Homeschooling enabled me to move at his pace, sometimes very fast (geography–he memorized maps like nobody’s business) and sometimes very slow.<\/p>\n
There were setbacks.\u00a0 When my mother died, a few months after I started homeschooling,\u00a0 our son regressed.\u00a0 (So did I–grief does that.)\u00a0\u00a0 The next three months were the worst: the only advance came when he acquired the word “NO!”\u00a0 which he hadn’t used before.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But the proof of the pudding came later, as year by year he developed and eventually made that seamless transition to high school.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For us, this worked.<\/p>\n
It would not work for all.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As I’d found when tutoring, one-on-one teaching is intense and takes a lot of energy.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Good teaching requires concentration on the learner’s experience and the energy and creativity to change the program if it’s not working.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If it becomes a dominance game (often the result of the teacher’s exhaustion or depression) , what the student learns is all about dominance–not the subject.<\/p>\n
When it’s your own child, keeping that in mind can be very difficult.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Detaching from the parent\/boss role to become the mentor\/teacher is impossible for some parents.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Very rigid and controlling parents may be unsuited for homeschooling, especially if their main concern is to prevent the child from learning or doing\u00a0 something.\u00a0\u00a0 But the disorganized parent who can\u00a0 provide little structure and cannot plan for long-term goals is equally ineffective.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Homeschooling is\u00a0 not just babysitting–parents who teach at home need to have in mind long term, intermediate, and short-term goals.\u00a0\u00a0 Especially for\u00a0 disabled students,\u00a0 teachers must be so thoroughly familiar with what they’re teaching that they can find multiple ways to approach a topic, be alert to student confusion, and be willing to change course in a flash to head off that confusion or follow a spark of understanding.<\/p>\n
Parents who are exhausted (emotionally, physically) by the tasks they already have should not plan to homeschool.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If\u00a0 the child’s needs suggest that homeschooling is a good idea, then the child needs a parent-teacher who has the knowledge, the skills, the energy, the time, and the creativity to spend–it is intense, steady work over a period of years, just as if the parent were a public school teacher.\u00a0\u00a0 With a disabled child, in particular, you can’t just buy someone else’s curriculum and plug the child into it–you need to develop a curriculum that offers just enough challenge now, and builds towards more progress later.<\/p>\n
Homeschooling can be an open door to the world–it can be the best way for a child–especially a disabled child in a school district with limited resources–to grow to their potential.\u00a0 But it’s not right for every child, every family,\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 every situation.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Choosing to homeschool should be a decision informed by consideration of\u00a0 the child’s needs and the resources available in public schools, private schools, and the home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thirty years ago,\u00a0 children with disabilities were not guaranteed education in public schools.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My state had residential schools in the state capital for deaf children and for blind children, but nothing for children who had other disabilities.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I remember the mother of a childhood friend fighting with the school board so her daughter–with severe hearing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,18,26],"tags":[23,49,50,47],"class_list":["post-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interventions","category-opinion","category-parenting","tag-flexibility","tag-opinion","tag-parenting","tag-socialization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions\/53"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}