Lucas Camilo

We’ve had a ton going on recently.  Among other excitement, Lucas had a visit from Grandma Susan, we went to a Pete Seeger all-ages sing-along, we’ve toured kindergartens, and we had a long weekend visit from our Oakland friends Daniella, Gabe, and Rafi.

Did I say kindergarten??!!  Yes, Lucas turns five this summer, meaning this fall we’ll be parents to a kindergartner.  Seattle schools does school placement in March, so we spent a good part of February figuring out how to navigate this transition.

This transition has been somewhat overwhelming both in terms of time and the emotions that seeing many potential future elementary schools for Lucas.  I ended up touring five public elementary schools – the one Lucas currently attends and four others that are closer to our home.

Meanwhile, we met with Lucas’s teachers, school-based therapists, vice principals of other schools, other parents, and special ed administrators at the district office.  And then hours of reading online, going through the district’s resources and highly trafficked parent listservs, trying to decipher the Seattle School’s special ed language and categories.

All of this to answer three basic and related questions:

A)   What school do we think will best serve Lucas?

B)   What school will the school district place him in?  And as a corollary, what schools won’t the district allow him in?

C)   What is our process for getting Lucas placed in the school we determine is best for him if it’s different than the district’s choice?

It stresses me (Krista) out just writing these down.  Because ultimately we can’t know which school will be best until we try.  But through our visits, it seems like there is a school closer to our home, where Lucas could have a number of things important to us: a welcoming school culture, a general education (ie “mainstream”) classroom placement, and school staff experienced with supporting children accessing education who have physical disabilities.  (As you can imagine, much of special ed is focused on emotional and behavioral issues, autism spectrum, etc.  This is all important, but we need people who can look at Lucas’s wheel chair, desk, classroom set up, paper, and pencil and come up with creative ways for him to do school work along with the rest of his peers.)

The school tours were emotional in part because I was on them with a bunch of parents of typically developing kids, many from over-achieving families.  They wanted to know reasonable things: about the playground and recess times, the computer labs, the fresh vegetable options for lunch, test scores, and whether or not there was a music teacher, art teacher, gym class, etc.  Some of these are things that are important to me, and of course it makes me sad to hear that schools are deciding between having a librarian or a music teacher.  But on the tours, as I watched kids in art class sewing a Harriet Tubman-inspired quilt, saw kids run around a wood-chip covered playground, listened in on a science class planning to clean up the drains around school to protect the salmon, and even smelling cafeteria food (which smells eerily the same as it did 30 years ago!) all made me sad.  I felt all sorts of nostalgia for elementary school – which I loved – and was reminded that Lucas might not experience many of the things that made school fun for me.  I hold out hope that he’ll find his own way to friendship and learning and adventure, of course, but for some weird reason the smell of corn dogs and over-cooked peas made me sad that there are parts of the school experience he won’t have.

Or maybe he will.  It depends mostly on finding staff who are interested and willing to be constantly creative so that Lucas CAN take part in the social element of lunch, even if his comes in through a tube.  It’ll take amazing art or science teachers to figure out how Lucas can help clean out a storm drain or make a quilt even if he can’t get down on hands and knees or sew a stitch.  And this is the hard, stressful, knot-in-my-throat-fearful part for me.  There’s no way to know if we’ve found that school with that staff until we pick a school and give it a try.

There’s a much less interesting, though equally long, story about how we’ve gone about answering questions B and C from the list above.  Fortunately we have the time to research and call and advocate, and it looks like we found someone at the district special ed office who is looking out for Lucas in this transition, and who agrees with us on the best placement for him.  We should get official word of Lucas’s placement in a month – keep your fingers crossed for us.

My favorite part of this whole adventure was taking Lucas with me to one of the schools.  In fact, only one administrator who led an evening tour invited me to come back with Lucas to sit in on a kindergarten class.  So the next morning Lucas and his nurse and I popped in on a kindergarten class.  They were in the middle of show-and-tell, but when we walked in every head turned, and what had been a quiet, orderly classroom turned into small chaos.  “What’s that?” “What’s that?” the braver kids shouted out and pointed at tubes, chair, ventilator.  The teacher did a great job of starting with asking Lucas’s name, giving me a minute to give the kids the words “wheel chair” and “vent,” and then they went back to show and tell.  The teacher asked Lucas what he had, and fortunately Lucas is always ready for show and tell.  He was carrying his T-Rex, and it turned out that about 15 of the kids were big T-Rex fans.  Other kids shared, and Lucas had trouble being quiet as he asked me (loudly) what everyone was doing.  When I explained that one kid – and then a few more – were sharing books they had made, Lucas got really excited.  “They made books!” he chanted, even after we left school.  The last kid who shared told that his favorite animals were the whale shark, the tiger shark, and the Tyranasaurus Rex, which I took to be a small shout-out to Lucas.  This, I hope, is the classroom he’ll be in next year.

Did we mention our latest trip to the aquarium?