(Background information for those who don’t know me – my daughter has cerebral palsy)
I just spoke to the resource teacher at Dori’s school and she recommends that Dori be removed from the Special Ed. roll! We’ve been at this school a year (after moving to Virginia from San Diego) and Dori’s done amazingly well considering such a major move at her age (13 when we moved, now almost 14) and grade (7th, going into 8th). She walks everywhere on her crutches – even to field trips and such, is participating in extra-curricular activities such as Girl’s Chorus and has had straight 'A’s. She’s written about 15 songs this year and sung one of them as a solo for church on Maundy Thursday – she invented the melody, too, but as she doesn’t yet read or write music, the church music director scored the melody for her and accompanied her on guitar. She’s now taking guitar lessons and learning to read music – in addition to her private voice lessons.
The resource teacher thinks (as I do) that the ultimate goal of special education should be to render itself unnecessary, but in actual fact that rarely happens. Being ‘off’ Spec. Ed. was our last goal – and, frankly, I
didn’t really expect to achieve it. So, hip-hip-hurrah, huh?
[skeptical self-hijack] Dori hasn’t had any therapeutic intervention for 3 or 4 years – no PT or OT or surgery and certainly none of the many alternative treatments for CP that we are constantly offered. Now, if we had been convinced to let her try the Adeli Suit or Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment or Rolfing or Feldencrais or something, wouldn’t we have ‘proof’ that these therapies ‘cured’ her? After all, she’s off Spec. Ed., right? Of course, she wouldn’t be where she is now if we had tried any of those things. All are so expensive we wouldn’t have had the extra money for her guitar and singing lessons, and so time-consuming that she wouldn’t have had the energy to devote to her studies and song-writing… [/skeptical self-hijack]
