Wishing special needs children can get support they need, without a fight

Note: This week on the blog, parents who have chosen a variety of schooling options will be sharing their educational wishes for 2016.

by Lydia Burton

When I think of the wishes that I have for my child, so many of them revolve around his education. Not just the ability to tailor his education to his individual needs, to provide him with all of the resources that I possibly can, and to help him realize his full potential, but for other people outside of the special needs circle to truly understand why his individualized education plan is important, and to help stand up for it.

I wish I didn’t have to justify every choice that we make that falls outside of the traditional school system. Parents who decide that the public school system isn’t a good fit for their child typically don’t have any major issues with the system as a whole. It simply isn’t the right fit for their child. When people take this as an attack on the system, what they don’t realize is that, with or without accommodations, if a school isn’t what’s right for our children, we aren’t going to place them there.

For too long, educating our special needs children has come at far too high of a cost, not just financially. Too often, households are forced to sell a car, take out loans, have parents quit their jobs, or divert attention from their other children, simply to provide the education our special needs children deserve. Families should not have to choose between maintaining their quality of life, and providing for their child’s constitutional right to an appropriate education.

Support is such an important part of any special needs family. When your child first receives a diagnosis, one of the first things that you are told is to seek out support. Without the support of people outside of our little community who are willing to stand up for the rights of our children, we risk losing valuable windows of opportunity in which our children learn best.

Being the parent of a special needs child means having to fight a lot of battles, and my wish is that someday soon, education will not be one of them.