In the System, but Not of the System

In a few weeks we are going into our son's articulation IEP meeting to High School. Articulation refers to that high stress meeting when we morph a grade schooler into a high schooler. We have had several productive pre-meetings, but this IEP is still a high stress event.

This High School is huge in size and in reputation. Every year, more or less, they win prizes for journalism and academically out do themselves. The entrance to the High School looks somewhat like the lobby of a large corporation, which given their budget and personnel and 4000 students, it is a very large enterprise.

You can feel the tension in the air as you walk the halls. We had a chance to visit several classrooms and the intensity was not like the liberal arts university that I went to, it was far more like law school.  The emphasis is on high achievement, making the grade and scoring that choice college or university. All highly laudable goals but the pressure to achieve those ends can be brutal.

One of the things I expressed from the first preliminary meetings was that we are on the 5 year plan with summers to take courses so that the school year would not be death by pressure cooker, and our son could also take part in some of the 200 after school clubs and activities. We have structured his day so that he has 4 academic classes and 3 study halls for sensory breaks, physical time out of his chair, relaxation for when he gets fatigued, and not to mention time to do academics so that the load is not overwhelming at home.

This scheduling concept while not novel, at first, seemed to the school personnel a little different, and we had to emphasize the usefulness of this approach. We were telling the High School personnel that we intend to be in the system with as much inclusion as possible, but we are not of the highly pressurized system that other students experience every day.  For us to do it otherwise would be to take the stress level and crank it into the red zone.

Our plan is for college to begin at the level of community college and then transfer to a 4 year school for graduation. For community colleges, sky high ACTs and SATs and straight 'A' grade points do not matter.  We are the tortiose not the hare; for us it is about finishing High School having acquired the necessary academic and social skills along the way.   That message will no doubt need to be respectfully reinforced because so much of the school is dedicated to students with other paths, and who are of the system.

Parents should not be afraid or reluctant to carve out a different concept for their student as he or she enters High School.  Education at this point in  a child's school tenure is about getting ready for life after public school.  The program in High School should be individually structured to achieve the desired post  graduation ends whether  a job, vocational training, college or other setting.

Comments

[Liz]

Dear Mr. Fox,

I've posted a link to this post to the SchwabLearning Parents' Board,

http://schwablearning.org/message_boards/view_messages.asp?thread=20596

I think a few parents posting there have had their kids on the five-year plan.

As always, I find your blog informative.

I think it's good to remind everyone the intention of school - to learn to be an active memeber of society (in whatever field that may be). For kids with disabilities, day to day tasks may be quite a struggle, so working towards a test or what a teacher has to get through in an amount of time is irrelevant. School is the time for kids to learn skills needed to plan successfully, locate information they may need, communicate most effectively, and use tools to help them in their lives. Disabled or not, all kids learn these things at school, and those should be reviewed as bars of success when deciphering a disabled person's progress and accomplishments.

CMC Sherrard Cohort