Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Moving & Schools, etc.

As if we don't already have enough going on, our landlord decided to "do something different with the house" so we have to move by June 30th. Yes, that's 10 days before we're leaving for California - it's going to be a wild and crazy spring/summer! We're hoping to buy a house (yay!) and have been looking at various places.
When we moved to our current location, "good school district" was not even on the radar. I was teaching at a private school and my husband worked at the same school. There was no reason to expect that all of our children wouldn't enjoy the free tuition at that same wonderful private school. Now it matters a little bit more.
Our current school district is small, and fairly rural. There is no teacher of the deaf at all in the county, so they contract with one from another county. This is in my opinion only minimally effective, as evidenced by the fact that our OT was the one who saw the need for an FM system for Noah, and I was the one who notified that HI teacher, after realizing that no one else even considered that that might be helpful. Other than that, though, they've really been very good for us. Personality differences aside, everyone is really great to work with. We have a great team, who I feel really cares about Noah and getting him what he needs, and I couldn't be more happy about the K teachers that he would work with next year.
There are two other districts (besides this one) we have look at houses in, both of which are quite a bit larger and more suburban. They both have numerous HI teachers, along with the other services that we are already receiving (PT, OT, speech, vision, and O&M) but there is no gaurantee that the individual practitioners would be as top notch or as willing to work with us as our current location. Also, because the districts themselves are quite a bit larger, there's a lot more beaurocracy to deal with in order to get things done. Is it worth it to exchange the one service we want for all of the good things we already get? I just don't know. It's all a bit of a gamble, really. Any kind of change (even just moving down the street) is going to be very stressful for Noah, but the summer before kindergarten does seem the ideal time to make a change if one is going to be made. I guess we'll see what comes of it.

1 comment:

leah said...

Goodness, you are going to be busy! I hope you find a good district to move into...

Our district does have a TOD/HI teacher (surprising, considering the size of the district). She also works with kids learning English as a second language... but she won't work with Nolan at all until he's in kindergarten. And that's only if he qualifies for an IEP. Oy. Who knew preschool and kindergarten could be so stressful, just for the services involved?