The Payoff

There is finally a glimmer of hope in our educational battles for #3.  I have said all along that the craziness, the tears, the agony of it all would be worth it if we could just get him to the special ed teacher.  We truly believe that she can, will, and wants to help him.

Monday he got there.  She finally had the approvals needed to pull him from his regular classroom and focus her attention on him.  She started by calling me and asking for a list of his eye therapy exercises so that she could do them with him in her classroom.  She reasoned that if once a day will help him improve, then twice a day will help him improve more quickly. 

I cried with relief and gratitude. (I’ve never been a big crier before this, but now I can boo-hoo with the best of them.)  We are so grateful to at last find a professional in the public school system who is genuinely interested in helping our boy.

It should not have been this hard to get to her.  Traditional schooling is not designed to immediately help children who are anywhere except in the very middle of normal.  Parents of children with special needs have to work incredibly hard to get to the one gem of a teacher hidden somewhere in the school.  It should not be this way.

We will continue to pray for the school system to place helping children at a higher place of priority than that which is occupied by forms, rules, and bureaucracy.  Children deserve to be in a place where their best interests are first on the list.  They need to be where we now are.