Submitted by Ellen, Jul 23, 2007 00:48

I've been through the ringer with getting placement for my son, who was severely speech and language impaired throughout pre-school, and also had serious fine motor problems. I couldn't get appropriate placement for him as a toddler, so I settled for putting him in a regular nursery school, with minimum therapy (I say minimum because the BOE at the time would only grant him 2-half-hour speech therapy sessions and one OT session per week. He needed speech therapy every day, quite honestly. They granted him a SEIT (shadow teacher) for only 5 hours per week (he was in school from 9AM until 12:30PM). I was lucky to be able to choose when the "5 hours per week "would occur - - I decided that he should get at least one hour per day with the SEIT, and I chose what I thought was the most difficult hour in his day for the SEIT to work with him. However, because he really needed far more help throughout the day than what he was granted, I had to take off from work a lot (and my husband was unemployed at the time) to stay with him and help him through his school day. Needless to say, he really struggled getting through the day without assistance, and the school was not trained or equipped to deal with special needs children. This was a nightmare. He was treated like an outcast by the other children, because no one on the regular school staff helped him to "fit in". Fortunately, after 2 years of complete struggle to convince the BOE that my child needed more help, and with the aid of a lawyer, he had finally been placed in a wonderful special needs school (that I found on my own), and he is really flourishing, due to the great therapy he is finally getting. I can't help but think how much further along he might have been at the ages of 3 and 4, had he received speech therapy every day and OT at least 3X per week. I find it enraging that one has to "prove" their child needs the extra help, when clearly, it couldn't be more apparent, but the BOE wouldn't know that, because in my experience, my child was just a "number" and a bunch of annoying paperwork - not a person with needs and feelings. I even brought my son's SEIT to one meeting where I went in to beg for more services.... when we left the meeting, she said to me, "I am so appalled at how you were just treated, and that was one of the worst meetings I've ever witnessed!"
So, in response to this article, it could not be more WRONG to place a child in a public school situation when it is openly inappropriate for that child. The idea is NOT to set them up for failure, but rather, to set them up to SUCCEED, from the beginning. Watching a child "fail" is a heart-wrenching experience, and truly unnecessary.....

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