Common Fears: What about my special needs child?

I was quite confident in my ability to homeschool my kids until we began fostering a little girl with significant physical and intellectual disabilities. All of a sudden, “experts” were telling me about all the resources available to me through the public school system, and even my own mom, who had homeschooled my brothers and me, encouraged me to consider putting her into school. We did use the public school’s two-hour preschool program for a year, and I’m grateful for the attention from her special ed teacher and her full-time personal aide. But it seemed pretty ridiculous to break up my school morning to drive her over to the school, where she had an adult assisting her through basic skills while sitting in a classroom with no faces other than her own visible (this was at the height of covid, and our daughter was the only person in the room with a doctor’s note excusing her from mask wearing due to her sensory issues). I would get home and do one homeschool subject with the big kids, only to have to turn around and pick my daughter up! For a family who had done a rich and rewarding preschool at home for our older four children, it seemed ridiculously disruptive, and that year was the beginning and end of our public school experiment.

Now, as a member of the special needs families community, I want to be clear that there are so many types of disabilities, and the decision to put your child with disabilities in school is never one I would judge. For one friend, whose severely disabled child needs round-the-clock care, the seven hours a day her son is in school are the only time she has relief, and she is so grateful that he has an IEP that provides in-school services. For many parents of kids with special needs, homeschooling just doesn’t appeal.

But if you do want to attempt homeschooling your child with special needs, I have found that there are many benefits to doing so! In my daughter’s case, her physical disabilities, including impaired vision, meant that she had to have preferential seating (in the front row) in her public preschool classroom, and even then, she could not always see the board. In our tiny homeschool hybrid school that met in an old college dorm room, it wasn’t usually a problem, but at our homeschool table, where I am doing everything within arm’s reach, we can ensure that she is able to focus on all the materials I use to teach her lesson. She doesn’t need a one-to-one para; I am her one-to-one teacher!

In a homeschool setting, children with intellectual disabilities, which my daughter also has, are not rushed through grades of material to stay in a grade with their peers age-wise (but not intellectually) and can instead learn at their own pace. In a traditional school, her IEP team acknowledged that she was not yet ready for kindergarten after a year of special needs preschool, but she was nevertheless slotted to be pushed up into kindergarten due to her age. I’m grateful to her veteran classroom public school teacher who recommended a year of private play-based preschool. In fact, we spent two more years on preschool skills before she was ready for kindergarten, and she’s heading into a second year of kindergarten content because learning to read is a slow process for her. By age, she “should” be going into third grade, but academically, she’s still blending sounds and developing foundational number sense and actually should be doing kindergarten-level work. So I use kindergarten materials to work at her pace, and when she’s ready to move on, I will use first grade materials, regardless of her age. With no rush to complete a checklist by college (which is not something in her future), we have plenty of time to go wide on rich subjects like art and music and poetry and history while we’re plugging along on the basics of learning to read and write and add. As the gap widens between her same-age peers and her own academic progress, the benefits of tailored homeschooling only become stronger.

In a public school setting, kids are segregated by grades, with everyone artificially divided up by age. In our homeschool enrichment settings, our daughter plays and learns with kids of a variety of ages. Two of her special buddies are two and three years younger than she is, but developmentally, they’re all at the same stage and play together well. In our homeschool choir, students from age 5 to 18 sing together, so our daughter gets to socialize with friends of all ages. She has special buddies among the high school boys who play football with her older brother—these wonderful young men let her “tackle” them and race with them. Her big sisters are part of a gaggle of teen girls who do her hair and let her try to join their handicraft projects. While our daughter can’t keep up physically or intellectually with her peers of the same age, homeschool kids who grow up socializing with kids of all ages and stages rather than just the kids in their grade seem to find it easy to incorporate a slower, younger-seeming child into their creative play.

We don’t neglect her therapeutic needs at home. On the contrary, because our daughter is free during the school day, she’s able to do her private clinical physical therapy during the mornings, when her therapists have more availability and she is freshest to learn. (Anyone taking a child to a 4 pm occupational therapy session, after a full, frustrating day in a classroom has my sincerest pity.) Because we’re able to be a part of her clinical therapy sessions (something we wouldn’t be sitting in on at school), we can integrate that work into her home life and schoolwork. She also has more flexibility to participate in horseback riding therapy, by far the most impactful activity we do. Not only does she get to strengthen her core and have hundreds of repetitions of correct hip movements while riding her horse, but she learns social skills in her group class (with other kids who have a variety of special needs), gains confidence (she went through crying at the sight of a horse to happily feeding hers and helping get him saddled up), and has a lot of fun.

In many states, there are special programs that fund some of the extras that kids with special needs might need. For our family, since our daughter is adopted, she’s already eligible for a lot of assistance, and since she’s my fifth child, I already had a lot of general resources that I can easily adapt to her slower pace of learning, so we have found that we don’t actually need to take advantage of them. But for special needs families looking for assistance, your pediatrician’s office should be able to refer you to programs that come alongside children with disabilities in your community. Public school does not need to be your only source of assistance for your child.