Room in a School Building

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I showed up at the center that our district bussed Travis to for school and found him screaming in a closet. I took his hand and we walked out together. He never went back.

Our school district was not happy. They told me that we had to have a change of placement IEP meeting before he could move to another setting. Nope.

They told me that it could take some time for them to find another program for him to attend. I’m thinking that the special education director should make it his business to already know what programs are available in the area, but that’s just me. Especially if you are not going to set up a program within district.

At one point the district had encouraged us to home school Travis, said that he would be better served if we did. We were told that Travis was the only student in the district with his needs.

I refused to home school Travis for a couple of reasons. First, I knew that I would be a much better mom to Travis if I did not have to be his teacher as well. And second, the district had special education staff that had attended several years of school and had been trained in the special education field.

If even with all of their training they were at a loss on how to meet Travis’s education needs, how did they expect me to do it?

And I knew that Travis was not the only child in the district with learning and behavior difficulties. I had met and talked with other parents of struggling children in the district and attended support group meetings. I learned that the district had talked some of these families into home schooling.

In the meantime the district decided that it would provide Travis with homebound schooling for one hour a day. Yes, you read that right. One hour.

This situation was a mess from the get go. The woman that came to our house was not a teacher. She did not have any special education or emotional disability training. She did not have a lesson plan. She had applied for a full time position with the district and did not get the job. I know this because she told me. But then they called her and offered her the part time position of I guess you could call it tutoring of homebound students.

She would arrive late. Because it took longer than she expected to get to our house from the house of the last student she visited. And then she would leave early to allow her to get to the next student on time. So Travis did not receive his full one hour of schooling. (And here I thought Travis was the only student in the district with this level of need.)

And it would take great effort to get Travis to sit down and work. Because he wanted to show her his bird. And his room. And his motorcycle.

And when she would finally get him involved in an activity her phone would ring. And you guessed it. She would actually answer it. And take a personal call. And off he went!

I could immediately see that if Travis was only going to get one hour of schooling per day it needed to be in a school room. So that he would know it was school time. It didn’t need to be a classroom. It just needed to be a room in a school building. Any school building.

I contacted the special education director and asked him if he could come up with such a room. He said he would take a look and get back to me. After a few more days of total distraction at home I contacted the director again. He had yet to find some space. I reminded him that I was very familiar with the available space within our schools because I had served on the school board for eight years. So I was confident that he should be able to find a space.

A week later and still nothing.

So on a Friday as she was leaving I asked the tutor to meet us at our regular time at the school district administration office instead of our house. She seemed perplexed but agreed to do it.

On that Monday we walked in the building and I asked her to wait in the reception area. I knew everyone well in the office because of my school board experience. So no one seemed surprised when I walked to the door of the special education director with Travis in hand. He was just hanging up from a call and turned and asked me what he could do for me.

I responded, “You can get out”. He responded, “Excuse me”? Again I asked him to get out. I explained to him that until he found a room in a school building for Travis to have his one hour of learning that we would just use his office. And then I waved the tutor over to join us.

We did not have to use his office that day. He took us down to the basement into a small meeting room with a large table and a white board on the wall. And just like that we had our room in a school building for Travis to learn.

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.” - Oscar Wilde