Next Up

Alex is entering 6th grade in the fall, and he will go to a new school.

It’s been six years since we toured special-needs schools. Back then, as Jill points out, we were looking for a kindergarten, and kindergarten classrooms for the autistic don’t differ much from kindergarten classrooms for the typically developing.

So this will be new. First stop was the school of Ron’s, Alex’s old terrific EI special-educator who’s now unit teacher of a special-needs site in a New York City public school.

I got to the meeting before Jill this morning; I rounded a corner and there Ron was. “There he is!” Ron said. A friend. He’s greyer (”More dignified,” I told him) but otherwise the same spark and firm handshake.

I did know  what to expect six years ago but now, I’m unsure what to look for in a school tours.  Here are the same tiled walls, same small bathrooms, same construction paper and marker artwork festooning the corridors.

Jill’s biggest jump start on this next-level search for Alex was a phrase she heard at another special-needs middle school. “We have,” the unit teacher of that school told her, “an expectation of college for our students.” We had never heard any educator say anything like that about Alex before, and it was like a strong new scent.

Still, with the budget crunch I foresaw late last year, I was hoping Alex’s current school could make an exception and perhaps keep him another year. Better to be with the people who’ve taken you from stop-and-stares to reciting “The Pledge of Allegiance” when the money dries up.

“Then Obama came through the funding,” Ron notes.

So it’s up we look. Suddenly I have to start from square one with people who’ve sometimes seen but not really met Alex, telling them all the clever cute stuff he does. How he tricked me out of the boys’ bedroom last night so he could get the cat off Ned’s bed. How he tricked Jill into taking her hand off a doorknob once, because he wanted to make a break for it. How he says clearly, “I want cookies!”

Ron’s school was similar to the one Alex is in now — some rocking, some stimming, wheelchairs parked in the halls. Classrooms had the velcro schedules (”sweeping”; “work time”; “clean up”), the looseleaf binders of simple sentences in big print. “Who wants to read me the recipe?” one teacher asked.

The classrooms were smaller. In one, colored cloth shaded the fluorescent overheads to cut down on distraction. In another, students used a computer to read and relate the life cycle of the butterfly. Science class. “That right, a chrysalis,” the teacher said. Ron shows us yet another loose leaf with a checklist of jobs the older students here perform at a local golf course: pick up trash, clean tables, stock storerooms.

We’re looking forward to Alex’s future. He could have one here.

“If there’s an opening,” Ron said.

(Great NY Times piece on the effect of swine flu-related school closings on special-needs parents.)

[Image: Credit: Valeriana Solaris (flickr.com)]