The Brookston Family Blog

We met with an educational consultant this morning to get some help with Porter's overall education needs. Since we've started adding outside personal tutoring such as language therapy, occupational therapy and play-based therapy we need someone to essentially pull it all together in a way that makes sense.

Plus, his school is hinting that next year they want to move him to the more advanced class for kids with austism. While this is good news and we're thrilled that he's responding so well and making such great progress, there's also some bad news. The more advanced class has sixteen kids with only one teacher and two assistants, which is way too many to give any of the kids the personalized attention they need. There's an epidemic of kids being diagnosed as autistic and the medical establishment is putting their head in the sand and pretending it's not happening. And the schools aren't doing much better. The teachers are trying their best to help the kids, but Governor Terminator keeps terminating school funding even though by law schools are bound to provide adequate education for special needs kids beginning at age three. So while you'd think an increase in class size would prompt any reasonable person to conclude more teachers are needed to create more classes, instead next year they're going to split the class into two, with a morning and afternoon session. Well, you say, that sounds good, only eight to a class. And it may be better, but they're also decreasing class time from four hours per day to two and a half hours, or seven and a half hours less per week. They claim it will be "more intense." What bullshit. It's about budgets and money. We're steaming about this and are trying to figure out what to do next. We're hoping an educational consultant will also be able to help us with this problem, too.