New School
Zoë will be attending a new school in a few weeks. This is through her current school, which, as I've mentioned, is a specialty school for autistic spectrum disorder kids. This is an integration program, which is why the new school. Three of the children from her class are going to participate, though others may join later. Two of the teachers from her class will be in attendance all the time, even on the playground, so none of the kids from Zoë's school will ever be unsupervised on the playground or anywhere else.
I went to visit the school yesterday and it's pretty remarkable. They're a bilingual school, and all the signs are actually in German. This is good, because Andrew did four years of German (he went to Lutheran school!), I lived in Germany for three years (my German isn't very good, but I'm at least familiar with the language), and Miranda's school has German as their second language.
You might think that kids who have trouble learning language at all would have even more trouble learning a second language, but there are other autistic kids at this school (mainstreamed, rather than on an integrated program) and apparently they do catch on without too much trouble. One of the kids even says that German is his favourite class.
The school also has free range chickens! There's a nice, open air chicken coop big enough to walk into easily, and the chickens can get out and go in as they wish. The chickens, I'm told, all come out at break times to look for food. Smart chickens.
In the science room, they have all kinds of reptiles, including lizards and a long-necked turtle. There's also a garden patch that the kids are cultivating, and they'll use the produce in the science lab for various projects and possibly to feed the reptiles.
And this won't bother Zoë at all, but the school has a ton of stairs. Ugh. The school is built into a hillside, and has lots of different buildings that go right up the hill, with stairs to connect them in various places. If you're able-bodied, I'm sure it's not a big deal at all, but I've got bad knees (one more than the other, but they're both pretty much shot), and I found the stairs quite exhausting. There's absolutely no way that a physically disabled child could attend that school, and I suspect that a blind child would also have a lot of problems, which is probably why they have provisions for autistic kids. (Most schools can take some kinds of special needs kids; the one where Zoë's Nanna taught had a program for the deaf, for example, and Miranda's school is ramped and mostly on one level and can take kids with physical handicaps easily.)
So, this will be a big change for Zoë. I don't know how long she'll take to adjust to it. I think in the long run it will be really good for her, and I'm sad that her best friend isn't going to the new school (yet, anyway), but one of the other kids who is going has been in her class since the start of school. She'll also be able to continue with the "Girls Friendship Group" which has five little girls in it (including Zoë's best friend) and which is run by the speech therapist. Not sure about the logistics of that yet, but the two schools are pretty close an they have a small fleet of buses so it's not hard to transport kids back and forth.
Being a person who doesn't really like change much, I'm still a little bit apprehensive about this, but it is my genuine belief that after the initial adjustment period, this will be really good for Zoë's development. One of her biggest challenges, now that her speech is on track (she's still behind and needs speech therapy, but she can now speak in full sentences and tell lies and answer and ask questions and demand to be taken to McDonald's and lots of other good stuff), she really needs to get some of the social interaction going. She does well enough in an environment with just specialty teachers and other auties, but around neurotypical kids with age-appropriate social skills, she still sticks out like a sticky outy thing.
All in all, I think this is a good step forward. I'm in no hurry to see her mainstreamed, and we can take her out of this program if it seems to be too much for her or it's just not working out. Now all we need to do is buy a bunch of new school uniforms. The new school has completely different school colours...
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