Author: Dave

Fewer Choices, Less Time

It feels like we are in a constant search to find a school where my son belongs.

For the first few years, we sent him to one of the city’s best public schools. They didn’t know what to do with him, so he drifted from grade to grade while we struggled to make accommodations for his stunted academic and social growth.

Last year, we moved him to a new virtual school, hoping to alleviate his anxiety that my son felt going to his previous school. While it may have achieved that goal, virtual learning amplified my son’s challenges in the classroom settling and left him further behind. Sitting in front of a computer all day on a video call with a big group of other 5th graders results in a controlled chaos that taxes my son mentally and physically in ways that I didn’t expect.

As a result, we’re once again exploring our options. But the reality is that every time we do this, we do so with fewer options and less time.

When we try a new approach, make a modification, or check out a new school that turns out to not be the right fit, we have fewer choices. The traditional classroom-based, lecture, teach-to-the test education system, which is how the vast majority of schools operate, doesn’t work for my son. He tries so hard, but his difficulty with executive functioning, processing, and retention taxes him to the point of mental and physical exhaustion. That exhaustion makes his processing and retention worse, feeding back into itself until his body and mind tap out and we are left picking up the pieces.

There are other schools, but the ones that have a different teaching method are scarce, expensive, or far away. We called them, though, and talked to the administrators. In some cases, we were told that their school wouldn’t be a good fit. In other cases, we were told that it might be a fit based on our description, but we continue to struggle to get the right amount of documentation to accurately represent where he is. But we can’t get that because we haven’t found a place with the resources or the expertise to make a recommendation for a child who doesn’t fit into a predefined box.

Now, we’re looking at 6th grade. That’s only three years until high school. Three years, and there is no guarantee, even if we find a new school this year, that it will be any different. We’re running out of time to find a place or a way to educate my son enough for him to enter the world. I used to feel like he had his whole life ahead of him, and now I just feel the pressure to find a solution before the system cuts him loose.

I had always expected that someday my son would be like everyone else. I used to believe that, with modifications, we could educate him alongside his peers who didn’t have his challenges. I used to have “normal” as the bar. It’s the same mistake that the education system makes. It’s the same mistake that the world makes.

I don’t feel that way anymore. It’s difficult to predict the future of his condition or to know what he will be capable of as he stumbles through school. We are so focused on finding a way to educate him now that we’re not thinking about college. I’m not even sure that college will be in the cards for him if we can’t find a solution that works for him in middle school and high school, and those grades went from being far out on the horizon to staring us in the face.

Little Boxes All The Same

And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same
And there’s doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.

Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds

Fans of the TV series “Weeds” might recognize those lyrics from “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds. That song plays in the back of my head every time I have a conversation about how my son struggles in school.

The systems we have in place aren’t designed for individual people. They are designed for boxes. These boxes are generalizations, collections of people who are enough alike to be treated all the same. Alike enough, but not exactly the same.

Generalizations make it easier for our brains to make decisions. Our ability to generalize is a useful skill when we need to make a decision quickly, such as deciding if the object in front of us is a threat. It serves a purpose and works well in many situations. But there are times when generalizing doesn’t work…when someone doesn’t fit cleanly into a category…that requires more intentional, deeper thinking.

But that takes work. It takes effort. It involves contemplating risk and feeling unsafe. As a result, as a society, we don’t do it enough. We certainly don’t do it enough when it comes to educating our children.

It’s clear, as we look for a school that is a better fit for him, that my son doesn’t fit into one of the boxes set up by our educational system. He’s not a traditional student. He’s doesn’t have just a learning disability, or just a behavior or attention disorder.

At many schools that we’ve talked to, they have boxes for those types of students. On the side of each of those boxes are instructions for what to do with the students inside. There is guidance on what to expect from them, how to teach them, and how to measure their progress.

We’ve spent the last seven years trying to fit our son into one of those boxes because that’s how the system is set up…it’s the only way that it knows. But each time, my son fell to the bottom of the box and was hidden behind the other children…the children who are better fits for those boxes and who the system knows how to handle.

When it was clear that my son didn’t fit into a box, the schools would remove some of the expectations from him that applied to the other students. By removing those expectations, he would look more like the other children and could stay in a box longer. Their goal was to keep him in one of the boxes they already had because it was easier than trying to figure out how to educate him as an individual.

But removing expectations had the opposite effect. Instead of helping him work his way back to the surface, it weighed him down. Eventually, he’d sink so deep into the box that he was invisible. It was up to my wife and I to reach down into the box to grab him and pull him out. But even then, that just meant we had to try a different box even though we know that there isn’t one that he belongs in.

Because he’s not the same. He’s one in 7 billion.

Meeting Emmet

During the first few weeks of January, we traveled to Xenia, Ohio, to meet our son’s service dog, Emmet. It was a meeting more than two years in the making.

This is the second video documenting that trip where we finally meet our new family member and share some of the training we went through to be able to bring him home. Enjoy!

If you would like more information on service and service dogs for children, please check out 4 Paws For Ability.

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