Back to School, Without a School
August 14, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
It’s about three weeks till Charlie goes back to school. He’s (as often noted here) looking forward to it, as he knows that a good classroom with well-trained teachers and therapists awaits him. But what if you don’t have a school for your child to attend—-that’s the situation facing some autistic children in Tucson: KVOA reports on Vanguard Preparatory School, which was
….. supposed to be a centralized learning environment for children with autism. They’d get all their educational and therapeutic needs met right here. Debra Benson is a speech-language pathologist.
She says, “We were having a very low student to teacher ratio so it was going to be very individualized.”
Vanguard was supposed to open September 2nd, but state lawmakers pulled the plug on Arizona’s scholarship for pupils with disabilities. The majority of the nine registered students needed that cash to attend. Without money, there’s no Vanguard.
Vanguard’s administrators are not ready to give up and are hoping to offer an after school program, or a summer school, for kids with autism instead—–but with the school year starting soon, where are the students who were planning to attend the school going to go?
Wow that is unsettling. Guess they need new IEPs and back to the starting point of searching out schools.
We will be hearing more and more of this as the opening of school approaches. Budgets have be hard hit this year.
In a few weeks people will wish they had spent more time greening our schools.