Dealing with our educational bureaucracy is so fun. I got tired of waiting for our state gifted coordinator to answer my email so I sent another. She replied that she could not answer the first one because she never received an email from me. So I found an email from her assistant with the gifted coordinator's message to her that she was going to be out of town for a few days. The assistant was too busy to take care of it so she forwarded it to several more people and so on, leaving me with no answers. I might be able to overlook this if it hadn't happened to me several times before with our state dept. of ed. They put email addresses on the state website so that it looks like they are accessible to the general public and then don't answer emails. That's okay. I have copies of all of my emails and I will write "no reply received" when I attach them to my letter to the senator.
I did receive a reply from the special ed department, finally. It took them two weeks to tell me that my son would not have been eligible for any kind of therapy for the handwriting difficulties, visual motor integration problems (at the 1% level) and sensory integration dysfunction when he was in kindergarten at the public school because he wasn't really failing in anything at that time. Apparently, just because the kindergarten teacher recommended T-1 (a year of coloring) in between kindergarten and first grade to develop his fine motor skills would not have been seen as a serious problem because he was reading at a 5th grade level and doing math at about second grade level including some multiplication at the end of Kindergarten because I did have the option to send him to first grade anyway. I just had to sign a statement saying I didn't agree with sending him to T-1. I still can't get over the fact that the teacher thought it was perfectly okay for him to not learn anything for an entire year except coloring better.
Like my son said in Kindergarten, school is not very educational. He also called it the rudimentary elementary because all they want you to learn is rudimentary skills. A lot of people (especially the teachers at our school) would argue that is all elementary school is for.
In my email to our state superintendent of public schools I asked for a definition of a "free, appropriate education" and described our situation and asked if our Kindergarten experience met this definition. It has been almost two weeks now and no reply. Again, that's okay. I'll just attach a copy with "no reply received" written on it to my letter to the senator.
I do think the info that I have collected so far is supporting my position that I do need to homeschool, but I am going to argue that as a taxpayer my son should be entitled to some of the extras at the school like the gifted class and music or band. I know my special ed teacher friend thinks the school should also provide occupational therapy for my son's sensory integration issues but I think that is a lost cause. He now reads and comprehends at a high school level and is also advanced in math. He isn't failing in anything because he types and is allowed to learn the way he learns best at home.
Our school is probably really good at preparing students for factory jobs where coloring in the lines and only following directions and not asking questions is a good thing, but maybe they haven't noticed that our factory jobs are leaving the state.
