Special Ed at 109-My Personal Experience

There have been significant discussions the past few months about special education services at and our teachers’ negotiations.

While I am not completely clear about the services they are considering cutting, I can only offer up my personal experiences and the unbelievable benefit my children have received from those services.

My oldest daughter, Chloe, was in first grade when I received a phone call from her teacher. For whatever reason, anything with my eldest seems traumatic to me. So Chloe’s lovely teacher told me that my daughter was having difficulty learning to read and could she enroll Chloe in a program called “Project Success.”

The teacher explained that through “Project Success” Chloe would get pulled out of class for 30 minutes of private tutoring every day to work on her phonemic awareness, sight words and reading skills.

After ending my hysterics and thinking through this for a minute, I came to my senses and said, “Yes, of course!”

What an amazing program. Within a short number of months, Chloe had moved from a struggling reader to a first grader who loved reading and succeeding. This program was truly a success for us.

Our other experience with special education services came with my son, Seth. At 2, he was completely unintelligible. His language consisted of all vowels and no consonants. He began speech therapy in a private practice, then with the state’s Early Intervention Program.

By 3, he had qualified for speech therapy with the District. He began seeing Grace DeRoose twice a week for 30 minutes. Eventually, it increased to three times per week. This continued for almost three years.

Seth’s lack of intelligibility resulted in him having difficulty making friends, becoming physical when he wasn’t understood and other children teasing him and asking him if he was speaking “alien” or another language.

Unfortunately for Seth, he understood everything but only a few of us understood him. Seth understood early on that his time with DeRoose was important. They played word games, they talked with each other, and slowly, but surely, his speech began improving.

DeRoose proved to be not only an excellent speech therapist, but an amazing cheerleader for Seth, an amazing resource for my husband and I and a truly life changing human being in all of our lives.

If you would ever meet Seth these days, it is doubtful you would even know that he had a major articulation problem. He is incredibly outgoing, loud, and as his Kindergarten teacher would most certainly tell you, a complete chatterbox.

The District 109 special education resources my family has utilized have been excellent. I feel fortunate to have been able to take advantage of such amazing opportunities for my children. I hope the families who move into District 109 schools in the future will have the same opportunities.