Additional Needs
Age Appropriate
by Jodi Shenal
on 26th April, 2024
The Special Needs Homeschooling Movement
It is quickly becoming a preferred method of schooling for children with special needs.
We took a closer look into why we’re seeing this new shift in how children with special needs are being taught especially in light that most families find inclusion a very important part of what they want in their child’s life.
There have been some growing concern with tragedies that are reported in by news media.
A story involving an older child with special needs whom inadvertently was left on a bus, which cost him his life.
Parents are fearing they will send their children off to school and not see them return home.
News reports of bus drivers getting so lost that they are driving special needs children around for over four hours without reporting in to anyone.
Reports of children with special needs being abused by teachers and staff are becoming increasingly more common, which has created the push behind the drive to have cameras in all classrooms.
Social media is filling quickly with graphic and heartbreaking photos of children who have suffered not only emotional injuries but in many cases severe physical injuries.
Some of these injuries even inflicted by peers without adult supervision or intervention.
And then the continued increase of school shootings in reported all across the United States.
No school-age seems exempt.
Children and teachers incorporating into their routines emergency plans and parents are fearful of where that leaves a child who is confined to a wheelchair and has no where to hide.
Special needs parents who also have a medically fragile child also are leaning towards homeschooling as a way to detour and filter out unnecessary germs that could take aim and cause further health complications for their child.
A common cold could turn into a life-threatening illness during cold and flu season which is quickly passed from one child to another.
Some parents state that their child simply is overwhelmed with a school setting and is unable to handle the sensory challenges associated with a classroom full of other children.
Thereby, creating the need to provide a learning environment for them at home which doesn’t overwhelm or over stimulate their child.
Exhaustion over IEP meetings that result in plans not being followed, and their children failing to be included.
Parents no longer wishing to fight the school system, they turn to homeschooling as another way to eliminate added stress in fighting a system that they cannot change.
And now with new proposed laws in California aimed to force vaccination even upon children with special needs who may already have compromised immune systems and neurological challenges just to be able to attend public school, has parents searching for other alternatives in homeschooling to preserve their child’s rights and what they feel is in the best interests of their child.
No matter what factors are that are the causes of this shift, it’s important to take note that parents are having to make harder and harder decisions regarding the avenues that they are pursing for their child’s educational needs.
Special needs families choosing to take the homeschooling route should be offered continued county services in-home, be offered ways to partake in field trips with their peers as they deem necessary and fit, and most importantly not be judged for their homeschooling decisions for their child.
With this growing trend, it is exceptionally important to share special needs homeschooling resources within the special needs community.
If you are a homeschooling parent what resources, sites and curriculum do you find most beneficial?
