Hello everyone!
I know its been a while, but a lot has been going on. The kids are out on summer break. So now my house is full of running screaming monsters. Just kidding. But they are monsters. Any who, a lot has happened since my last blog. My dear husband tore is ACL while playing basketball. He had to have surgery to repair it, and is now on crutches for most of the summer. My daughter, who is in the proficient class(honors program), had a banquet at the end of the school year. She was honored for making Honor Roll for the whole school year! She tested top second in her class. The other child tested higher than her only by a few points. Honor roll for the entire school year is a huge accomplishment for a 1st grader! She is now heading into second grade.
My son Christopher, who is autistic, just graduated from preschool and is heading into kindergarten. We are so proud of the two of them that it overflows out of us every time we talk about it. Christopher is doing wonderfully. He stills struggles with speech and social communication. We have noticed that he isn’t showing as many sensory issues as before. I am so happy to announce that he will be attending Julie Billiart School in the fall. It was a battle to get him to that point with his current school district. They didn’t want him to go. It seemed as though they met us with resistance all the way to this point. Even telling us that we wouldn’t get the scholarship and Christopher wouldn’t get accepted just to discourage us from applying to the school. Didn’t work though.
Don’t get me wrong his teacher was lovely, and the staff that I did have the pleasure of meeting were nice as well. However, the public school district just isn’t a good fit for Christopher. We never met the occupational therapist, which made we wonder if she was really ever there. We heard about her. We were once told that she was in the building, but when it came time for us to meet she miraculously disappeared. That led me to believe that he wasn’t receiving enough occupational therapy, being that he still struggles with buttoning his clothes, small hand eye coordination and a few other things. Its better, but I feel it would have been even better had he had more occupational therapy. The therapist was in the school I believe they said 1 to 2 times a week. She was spread thin between all the schools in the district. For reasons similar to these, we decided to pull him out of the public school system and get him into a private school.
The new school is awesome. They have everything that he needs right there. They have a decompression room so that he can take a time out. The class sizes are small. And he will have 2 teachers in every grade from kindergarten to 8th grade! They use tablets for learning so he will also be tech savy as well. Which is so important for this generation of children. They have all of his therapies located at the school too. We are in the process of applying for the Autism Scholarship( I will include a link at the end for information on the scholarship.) The school will cost almost 20,000 per year for him to attend, but its worth every penny and more. About the SSI. We are still waiting on our hearing date. He was denied for the second time so now we have to go to court. Not looking forward to that. But we will do whatever we have to do in order to make sure that Christopher gets everything he needs to be successful in his life. From beginning to end! On that note, Im going to leave you here! Looking forwards to updating you through out the course of the summer. Please check out my other blog I Love Photography and show some love while your there!( I will include a link for that too! 🙂 ) Have an awesome summer.
Links mentioned in the blog:
My other page: http://tanishasalaryphotos.wordpress.com
Autism Scholarship Info: http://education.ohio.gov/Topics/Other-Resources/Scholarships/Autism-Scholarship-Program
Momma Of 3 