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Everything else aside, it boggles the mind that it is considered appropriate for a non-verbal student to be mainstreamed.
There is the trend now to put kids in mainstream education if they are capable. If he's otherwise smart, he may be able to learn in mainstream setting with support. If he can't get a place in a special school and there's a mainstream place available, then it's wasting time to have him sitting at home doing nothing. The problem seems to be all the special schools are full and the mainstream schools can't accommodate his needs.
Non-verbal may be more akin to being spastic than to being intellectually disabled. The idea is to encourage and enable, by mingling with ordinary children, children with additional needs to achieve what they can, rather than using special schools as a dumping-ground. Some kids are going to be so severely impaired that mainstreaming is impossible, but for others, with adequate supports, they can get on.
In the past I've worked in vocational rehabilitation for developmentally disabled young adults, usually medium-functioning autistic young men. They came from a range of backgrounds, some of them being quite poor others firmly middle class. We provided an opportunity for them to do real work with non-disabled cooworkers but in a setting with professional support staff available for them when needed. There was an obvious gap in ability and self confidence between those who had been mainstreamed and those who had gone to "special schools as a dumping-ground". Their disability levels were otherwise very similar but those who had been largely schooled and housed together with the profoundly disabled were much harder to rehabilitate. Another interesting observation from that job: while most of our clients were between 18-25, their parents were still quite involved in their lives. Many of them had received extensive coaching by their parents to play-up or play-down their disability based on the audience. Around authority figures, anyone w' the gov't or in a medical setting they acted more disabled, when around family or especially their mother's friends it was the exact opposite. This was a problem as they tended to slot us into the "authority figure" role and calibrate their behavior accordingly which was very unhelpful in a vocational setting where we were trying to teach them skills and asses their competency levels.
Yeah, that's part of the problem I've mentioned before about gaming the system. Some do it in good faith as the only way they've found to get anyone to pay attention to the problem - if the kid is deemed capable, then any supports stop there even if needed. So the parents are nearly forced into exaggerating the problem in order to get anything done.
Some people do it deliberately and will coach/bully the kids into acting 'more disabled' so that the parent(s) can get more goodies (not that there are a lot of goodies going); for instance, from my social housing days, I heard the story of one parent who wanted a new house because her child was a wheelchair user and she claimed the doorways in her current house were too small for the wheelchair to pass through.
The problem there was that (1) the guys who went out and measured the doorways were sure they were plenty big enough and (2) even though the child legitimately had a prosthetic limb, she was mobile and not wheelchair dependent. In fact, the same parent who said her kid needed a wheelchair to get around the house, hence why Mommy wanted one of the nice newly-built social houses to move into from the older council house she was living in, used to send her kid to pay the weekly rent and said kid walked all the way to the council offices from where they lived and back home.
Preach, brother, preach! 😁
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