Preschools, post #1

For the last couple of weeks, Biffle and I have been touring preschools in the Lowcountry.  Starting this fall, Maybelle will be going to preschool, and we want to find the absolute best place for her.  This process has been revealing to me.  I've had a lot of thoughts, so I suspect I'll have more things to say than just in this post.

Biffle and I have discovered we are big into the Montessori vibe.  This isn't much of a surprise, really--we're the ideal Montessori family.  We love free-form education, geared toward the strengths and needs of each individual child, following children's lead in becoming independent people of their own, and this seems to be what Montessori schools are based on.  The school we toured last week was our third Montessori.  The staff seemed great, the school was wonderful, the kids were happy.  But being the parent of a kid with a cognitive disability has made me aware of a lot of things that probably wouldn't have even crossed my mind to investigate before Maybelle came along.

While the staff at this school said that they were fine with a child with Down syndrome becoming a student at their school, they didn't have any other students with Down syndrome.  The administrative person who gave us our tour wasn't completely sure that Maybelle would be a good fit for the toddler class, since Maybelle doesn't walk and all the typical kids in the toddler class--18 months to three years old--do.*  This woman suggested that it might be best for Maybelle to start in the infant class when she starts preschool in August, so she showed us the infant classroom.

This was an adorable room, and just as in the toddler rooms, the kids there seemed happy.  But it was immediately clear to me on looking at their faces that these are babies, and Maybelle is not.  They had sweet, vacuous baby smiles--their facial expressions were different than Maybelle's.  They had stuff to play with, but it was mostly squishy, simple stuff.  This was what I recognized at once:  although many of the folks in the infant room are at the same level of physical development as Maybelle--sitting up, beginning to learn to pull up and walk--she is cognitively in a different place than they are.  We know that Maybelle is and will be both cognitively and physically delayed, but her cognitive development is really rolling along quickly.  She's communicative, through sign language and vocal speaking.  She is incredibly curious.  She is doing what her occupational therapist calls "impressive emergent reading."  She needs to be in a classroom that will encourage her intellectual and physical development, not in a classroom that is geared toward where she's most delayed.  She needs to be with the toddlers.

We met the person who runs the school.  He seemed...nervous.  Uneasy.  To my great relief, he went ahead and voiced these feelings rather than just pretending that he was fine, because he gave us the opportunity to talk.  We told him what Maybelle is like as a person--how social she is, how hard she works, how much attention she pays to the world around her.  I told him how strongly I felt about Maybelle being in the toddler classroom.  We told him why the Montessori model is a good fit for us.  He asked us questions:  is Maybelle learning to walk?  Does she crawl or just sit passively on the floor?  Can she play by herself?  His questions made me think that he doesn't know a lot about kids with ds, so I was glad that he went ahead and asked them.

And the thing that meant the most to me about this school visit was that he listened, and he believed what we told him.  Although the administrative person who gave us the tour had suggested that Maybelle (unlike the other toddlers at the school) might have to come in and be assessed**, by the time we left the meeting with the head of the school, he said he didn't need to meet Maybelle, that if we wanted to enroll her, we could.  He seemed much more relaxed, and I felt a little bit of an activist rush, like there is room in this school for Maybelle to help folks to understand and appreciate a different kind of diversity than they currently have.

We still haven't made our decision about the fall.

*I will have more to say about this whole walking prerequisite in a later post.
**Notice the potential double standard.  This wasn't the only place where we ran into this.  I will have more to say about this later, too.