Dear School,

Ours is a special needs family.

Next year scares me.

I can’t imagine there’s a special needs parent that doesn’t feel that way.

Why is it different for us?

Well, I’ll tell you. My big three kids are going on to the next grade, regardless of what I do or say. There is no choice to be made unless we want to consider a different school all together or make a fuss in order to get a specific teacher.

For those of us who have kids with special needs, education feels a tangled web of barbed wire.

There is no well-marked path to follow.

There is no neat and tidy school registration day.

There is no glistening yellow brick road beckoning our children.

It’s not your fault, it’s just the way it is.

Our kids can’t be plugged into equations, figured out, with only enough time, paper, calculator, a sharpened pencil, perhaps.

You know what’s best for your child, you tell us.

The truth is, we don’t know.

If only we did.

On so many levels, parenthood is a big old crapshoot.

We try and we guess and we wonder and we research and we advocate, but what we know feels more like an educated guess.

It’s IEP meeting time and we will gather around the table and you’ll expect us to ask for things, to know more than you, to plead for what’s best for our precious little people.

We’ll give it our best shot.

Will you do the same?

We need you, depend on you to look out for our kids and give us our options, maybe put yourself in our shoes, think of your own children?

We want our kids to be the best versions of themselves and even more than that, we want a world that acknowledges perfection follows more than that simple old path.

Will you help us make that happen?

Will you pave the way?

Will you do the inviting so that the others see our little people do indeed belong?

Love, Us