Special Education Preschool

Patrick is eligible!

I just received a call from Fairfax County Public Schools, to let me know that Patrick was found eligible to receive services from the Special Education department.

What this means?

It means that starting September, Patrick will attend Preschool. He will be 2 months short of being 3 years of age, but in the Special Education System, children can start as young as 2 years old. He will attend school with children that have similar developmental delays (about 6-8 children per 2 Special Education Teachers in each class.) We have heard great things about Fairfax schools, specially the ones by us, and, specially, the Special Education Preschool. We started the process about 3 months ago, and we still have one more meeting to find out how many times per week he will be attending, how many hours, and what are the goals, and answers to all my dozen questions.

This is bittersweet for me, for two reasons:

a) This means my Patrick will be gone during the day. I will miss him. Most importantly, he will miss me. :-(
Patrick is with me ALL the time. Yesterday, when the family was hanging out in the living room, Patrick told daddy "mine! mine!" while pointing at me. I was blushing! Patrick thinks knows I belong to him. When he plays with other kids at the park or at the moms meetings, he comes often to check on me, to make sure I'm still around. But I won't be around at school. He will cry, I know it already. At least the few first times. And I will cry at home because my baby is gone. You see how attached we are to each other? So, I know it's actually good he is going to school. He needs to socialize more, and be more independent, and I need to let go. So, it's all good. :-)

b) Patrick is a child with "special needs". :-( He will be attending a Special Education Preschool, not a regular school. Remember my dilemma about Patrick being a child with disabilities? So, knowing that your child has officially the "special needs" label, isn't easy for us. But, at the same time, given his delays, I'm glad he has that label. Let me explain why: From what I was told today, there are children that have serious issues in their physical, emotional and social developments, but those are due to the child's environment (e.g. parents that don't pay them attention, very poor living conditions, not access to proper health care, violence at home...) and if this was the case, then Patrick would fall into a different category. The fact that Patrick is found to be a "special needs" child, reassures us that it has nothing to do with the life we as parents are providing to him, but rather, is the way he was born.

I will write another post after we have said meeting, to explain a bit further what is going on and why is this so important to any child with disadvantages. I just wanted to do a quick note to write about him being eligible. In the meantime, here is a video of my sweet boys playing this morning.