Getting Ready for Preschool

We've been gearing up for Cooper's entry into the public school system. He'll be eligible for school district services when he turns three, so that's coming really soon. Over this past week, he's had a speech/language (SLP) assessment, a physical therapy (PT) assessment, and an occupational therapy (OT) assessment. Basically, the PT looks at gross motor skills: walking, climbing stairs or ladders, jumping, kicking a ball, throwing a ball, riding a trike (okay, the kind you push with your feet...) and the OT looks at fine motor skills: drawing a vertical line, a horizontal line, a circle, putting cereal in a container, threading beads on a string, sorting shapes, stacking blocks. All of this so that he can officially "qualify" for special education services. (Which, of course, he does....) I spend so much time with him, cheering all of his successes and looking at how far he's come that I find that I'm often blind to his delays. Not that I don't know they're there, but that he seems to get around them so well, I forget to think of them as delays. Even before he was walking, I'd truly forget that his gross motor skills were around those of a one year old (hence the not walking bit..) Ah well. I guess I've been well trained by my job to always focus on a person's strengths.

I'm still really torn about the role of a "typical" (read: private) preschool and the role of special education in Cooper's next few years. It's been quite a process (thanks to all you listeners...) for me to really identify and articulate what it is that concerns me about entirely special education preschool. It's not that I don't want him around other kids with special needs, or that I don't think the preschool teachers will be fabulous. Instead it's this cultural message that is implicit to me in a separate preschool- that our kids with special needs should be pulled out of the mainstream. I want to believe that we live in a community that values all different sorts of children, and what I've seen from the parents and children in our playgroups, kindergym, library and music classes is that that's true. We just have to work on convincing the schools that it's worth the extra hassle to include a variety of kids in their programs.