Wednesday, May 11, 2011

"School Shopping"...literally

Right now Lucca is getting minimal "free" therapy through a place called Early Steps but only up until he turns 3. Once he turns 3 they "set him free" into the public school world. Certain public schools have special programs for children with special needs that are somewhat segregated from the regular public school children. I don't really know how I feel about it, so we were looking into putting Lucca into a private school that was recommended to us by his PT. They accept the McKay scholorship (financial help for children to attend private schooling which the max is like $18,000 we were told) but apparently the child has to be in a public school for AT LEAST a year before they can even qualify for the scholorship and not until he is 4 or after. THAT sucks! So basically he would have to be in public school for 2 or more years before even qualifying because of the way his birthday falls in December (after the school year starts).

Monday we toured a possible school for Lucca. It is a private school for children with special needs. They offer PT,OT,ST and ABA services for children with developmental delays of all sorts. Well, surprise surprise, they have never heard of Lucca's syndrome lol.. (knew that was coming) so I had some lovely printouts explaining alot about it (hehe). The tour went OK. There were things we liked and some we were questionable about... Basically we didn't get the warm fuzzy feeling when we left.. PLUS, the tuition is $46,000 a year!!! Unbelievable!! The full amount of the McKay scholorship won't even begin to touch that! There is absolutely NO way we could ever afford that, especially since we aren't getting ANY financial help from our lovely gov't because we "make too much". Why doesn't the gov't take into account ALL THE BILLS that we are paying that deplete our money that we "make so much" of... Stupid.

So there are only 3 private schools in Jax that offer the therapies that he needs so it looks like we will be touring another facility in the near future... Very depressing! We are gunna have to have some kinda fundraisers or something or I need to find a new line of work!.. it is ridiculous how much these schools cost!

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