It's fall and school is starting again.

So after the holiday tomorrow school starts again in Minnesota. I know it started last week in Ohio and PA. Little different for me this year since my four year old starts preschool as well as my stepdaughter going to middle school. It's exciting to have them going bur also signals the end of summer. Any of you excited about the coming school year? @blountforcetrauma is Ben getting close to school age? Are you dreading it? My son Preston has what's called sensory processing disorder and we were do happy that he has progressed to the point that we aren't worried about him going to school. Just have to get him to realize he only goes on Tuesday and Thursday. Where does the time go.

 

Ben is 4 but he goes to a thing a couple of days a week that's like a little preschool thing during the year at his mamaw's church. It is called Parents Day Out. He really loves it. Natalie goes too and she is only 2. Next year will be his first year at actual school and we've decided to send our kids to private school. Down here the public schools in our county are in shambles. The school that me and my wife went to from kindergarten to 8th grade is actually the best one in the county on paper but we still just want to send them to private schools. Do you know of anyone that does that? My main skepticism about it is that we are just average folks and I hope we don't have to deal with a bunch of snooty people. The school is called First Baptist Academy and they have a great sports program there and I'm really glad about that because I want them to learn to compete. I hate to hear that about your little boy. My wife's cousin has something similar and goes to school but she does pretty well. The thing I would fear if I my kids had any kind of disability would be the other kids making fun of them or their teachers not having patience with them. I just wouldn't be able to stand someone picking on my kids.

 

My step-daughter went to the private catholic school in town because at the time they offered a better curriculum and had smaller classes with more opportunities for one on one interaction with the teachers. I can't steer you away from private schools because while yes there are some snotty kids and parents the vast majority are just normal folks looking to give their kids a better educational experience. The only negative for us was all the extra stuff that came with it, lots of involvement in the church, lots of required fund raisers, plenty of activities outside of just school work. Then they also pushed for us to enroll Preston and Emma early so they could get that tuition money but since the nun who was principle retired two years ago the school programs have gone down hill and the public school is now the better option.

I'm very thankful that our school district is progressive enough that the elementary school has had all of its teachers and assistants go through workshops on how to deal with kids with sensory issues. We found out about Preston's because he was being bullied by a little girl at daycare and she was organizing the other kids against him, telling him he was a bad boy all the time and things like that. They say most sensory kids have a trauma like that which triggers things. My in laws had a problem with the diagnosis initially because all they heard was it was on the autism spectrum although at the very bottom. They equated that with being slow when in reality he is smarter than most kids his age, he just doesn't know how to process all the data his body is taking in. No sense of his body in space, the best way to describe it is imagine you are in a dark room, covered with a heavy dark blanket and are blindfolded. He has made amazing strides to the point where most things that are outside his routine don't upset him but if he gets too far off them it can trigger a sensory event and he will act out or hide or just cry and hide. Those are few and far between now. I'm just glad he is able to talk to other kids and have it be ok and play with them without having that negative experience that he did in his early life. One of the things he loves is watching youtube videos by the family called the engineering family where they play with toys and he can see what playing with the toys is like.

 

That's good to hear about your boy adjusting. That is beyond awful to hear that those kids were doing that to him. We met these people on vacation a few years ago that had a little boy with a service dog and I got to talking to them and they said he had the dog for autism. They said that he had issues with space as well and that he had no concept of danger but that dog would alert him to danger. He would do things like walk right out in traffic if the dog didn't alert him to the danger but they said that dog was basically the greatest blessing they'd ever had. As far as that school, I've always figured Catholic schools would be really good schools for instilling discipline in the kids. Down here our public schools are about like Lord of the Flies or something. The kids do whatever they want and the teachers are basically powerless to stop them. Private schools in general just seem to offer more accountability and the teachers seem to have more liberty with laying the law down. Also we've heard tons of horror stories about common core and we can also avoid that through private schools. I didn't realize private schools done a lot of fundraising though. My wife gets extremely annoyed with public schools doing that because she wonders where the tax dollars go. LOL.

 

I don't ever want to say I'm thankful for my sweet little boy getting bullied but it did help us to realize he had something else going on. I don't think we would have pieced together that the reason he was only asking for two different meals is because food texture can register as almost painful to sensor kids, his balance issues weren't attempts at being silly he just didn't know where his body was in relation to the seat of a chair. It was all very enlightening once we started researching it. Like I said very thankful the school has training for its staff and plans in place for dealing with kids with sensory issues.

Yeah the fund raising is almost essential when you think about the local, state, and federal money that many private schools are missing out on. Tuition only goes so far and if enrollment drops they have to scramble for funds. I don't think the wife and I minded some of the fundraisers but when you live in a smaller community sometimes change causes people to act in less than charitable ways. For a catholic school I saw some parents who lost sight of the reason they were doing the fund raising which is helping the kids and treated it more like a clique than a church function. I just try to remember that no matter what I can help to instill a love of reading and learning in my kids and help to fill the gaps that the schools don't get to.