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Homeschooling a visually impaired child
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Question:
We have a 7 year old son in the first grade. He is legally blind and is
beginning to use different tools to help him learn in the classroom. We are
seriously considering homeschooling, but have learned that the public school
services will not be available to him in the event we do. Is there anyone
out there who has experience with this that can offer encouragement/input?
Answer:
- We were able to homeschool our daughter under the school system. The visual
teacher came to the house about twice a month and the regular teacher once
per week. The success of this depends largely on the teacher who goes to
your house.
Federal services cannot be withheld because of homeschooling. I think local
ones can.
Try to get homeschool written in the IEP if there is good reason for it.
- I have a daughter who happens to be deaf. We would never dream of
homeschooling her because she goes to an excellent public school program. If
it wasn't, we would certainly look at all of the alternatives.
I think that it's a much harder decision to homeschool when the child has
some sort of disability (whatever that might be). You have to make doubly
sure that you are able to teach your child as well as the public school
teacher could. Blindness like deafness is low incidence, so my guess would
be that your son's class is quite small. My daughter, only has 7 kids
in her class. Lots of personal attention from a quite good teacher. She's
been lucky, though. She has always had good teachers. I know that this is
most definitely not the case everywhere. One of her friends is brought from
50 miles away every day for class because their local program is really
quite awful.
It's been my experience that the average special ed. teacher is "better"
than the average regular ed. teacher (and I should state for the record
that, when I'm not writing books, I'm a regular ed. teacher -- a regular ed.
teacher that supports homeschooling, I might add).
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