WAAY 31 Coronavirus Q&A: What about services for special needs children during school shutdown?

WAAY 31 Coronavirus Q&A: What about services for special needs children during school shutdown?

Dan shaffer: superintendent barnett, this question is for you.

Kaitlin does not live in dekalb county but she shares concerns about home-schooling as a lot of parents are right now.

She writes, i have a 6-year-old daughter who goes to school.

She has special needs.

She's autistic, receiving speech, occupational and physical therapy at school and is also in a resource class.

She continues.

My biggest concern as a parent is that she's used to a routine and used to doing certain activities and less slessons aschool and it is difficult to get her to focus to have her work on educational stuff at home.

Can you answer any of her concerns?

>> mr. barnett: those are very good concerns and questions that you have.

We are obviously going to be teaching from home and that's going to mean virtual distance learning, paper pencil learning.

We're going to make sure we meet the needs of our students no matter what resources they have in their home.

What their needs are.

We're doing this because it's a public health issue.

This is a public health crisis.

Because it's public health crisis we can't send students into school which means we're not going to be able to put individuals or personnel into your home or bring your student on to our campus to provide some of the services.

That being said, we want to be reasonable and make accommodations and support for your children to be successful.

That may mean digital learning, we're available.

The accommodations we may be able to provide we possibly could do speech therapy through an online platform if that is reasonable accommodation for you and your family.

We could do some visually impaired, we could do some larger print, we can do some things.

There are many things we can do but we may not be able to do everything.

That being said, the routines you mentioned and the schedule and having a routine of consistency, that's something at home that hopefully you can provide through scheduling can your child and carry that out.

We are concerned about communicating with our teachers and our parents.

One thing i'm going the ask all of our parents to do is make sure they have weekly contact with our parents and answer any questions or concern or provide guidance.

Check on them, see how they're doing, how is their well-being, what with question do to better support them.

Have an open dialogue with your child's case worker, whoever helps develop their iep, their homeroom teacher.

And share with them their concerns and maybe you can work through some accommodations to make those needs.

>> dan shaffer: there are going to be a lot of specific cases that have to be dealt with on on individual basis.

This is from another concerned parent.

I'm a mother of 4, one is autistic.

Learning disability with an iep.

I have not the first clue on how to properly teach him and how well he's going to keep with this.

All while teaching my foirt grader and first grade we're he 2-year-old son playing around.

I have no internet because i cannot afford it.

I completely agree with the decision to keep our loved ones and the community safe but it definitely makes me very nervous and stressed.

Superintendent barnett, what can you say to parents in that position, overwhelmed and what are school districts able to do to address some of the concerns felicia writes about?

>> mr. barnett: teaching and learning smowb fun.

Some of the best times i ever had was a classroom teacher working with students and having fun.

I encourage you to have fun with your child.

We don't want to overwhelm you.

The one thing i want to do and i want to stress to my administrators and teachers, we are not going to try to overwhelm our students and our parents who are working or may not have the resources or the experience or the educational knowledge to carry out maybe what we're asking of them to do.

We want to be reasonable.

We want to be minimal.

But we don't want kids to slump and go back and have that summer slide, as it's often referred to.

We want to support them on the core standards.

We're doing to provide minimal instruction, but valuable instruction so that your child can be successful.

Once again, the communication is going to be constant.

We've asked for many years for increased parental involvement, parental communication between the school and parents.

I think if there is a silver lining to this this could help promote that dialogue and engagement from the parent to the student and to the school connection.

So that's what -- if there's a silver lining that's it.

>> dan shaffer: