Surviving School Shut Downs When You Have a Special Needs Child: What You Need to Know

Wow, everything seems to be upside down right now. For the typical family of a child with special needs, upside down is an average day. From having to fight for insurance coverage, appropriate school services and basic understanding from the rest of the world, parenting a special needs child involves learning to navigate a constant obstacle course.

And then you throw in a school shut down and things start to get even tougher. For my clients, school shut downs mean a loss of services and often a loss of progress. For some clients it means having children home all day who are not safe for any care giver to watch, meaning the parents have to choose between keeping their child safe or working to make sure their family has a roof over their head and food on the table.

For other clients, this means the progress they have just started to see in speech, reading, writing, math, behavior can all be lost and recovering those skills could take months. This is a difficult situation to say the least.

So what do you do? What you have always done, which is remain calm and know that this is just another, short term obstacle you need to get around. You are the amazing advocates for your child and you will make sure they are okay in this process. Of course remember that you need support too and time to just decompress. Being the parent of a special needs child means you are a super hero but even superhero’s need a break.

So, what are your rights during this shut down? Here is a link to the guidance put out by the United States Department of Education: https://www2.ed.gov/policy/speced/guid/idea/memosdcltrs/qa-covid-19-03-12-2020.pdf?utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_name=&utm_source=govdelivery&utm_term. This offers basic guidance and basically states that if a school district is offering distance or alternative learning during the shut down to all students, they must also be implementing a student’s IEP, cognizant of health considerations. If a school district is not offering alternative learning during the shut down, IEP’s also do not get implemented until school re-opens, which is a tragedy for many students, especially those on the autism spectrum who rely on structure and regress easily or students with significant behaviors or mental health issues. For some of my student’s with significant school anxiety the break from school will actually bring momentary peace, however the return back to school after the unexpected break will likely only exacerbate the underlying issues.

For Connecticut families, which is where I practice, each town is making or has made the decision of whether or not to offer distance learning and is sending out memos to families as to what that will look like. Some towns are offering nothing at all and many towns are offering online learning. For many students with special needs, online learning is not a viable option as they need a much higher level of support to engage in even 1:1 learning.

It is not clear at this time how long the shut downs will last. I will continue to bring new information as it becomes available. In the meantime, make sure that you are in contact with other, supportive, families who are in a similar situation. Going through this alone is difficult.