Tag: syndrome

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The San Francisco Unified School District

If you have a child in San Francisco that attends public school then you’re very aware of the lottery system for which school your child can get to attend. I’ve yet to hear about this happening in other cities, but it is a crazy system for San Francisco to have and we were lucky…WE BEAT THE SYSTEM!

I’m not sure why we did, but it could be because our daughter is autistic so there’s a smaller pool of kids to draw from. You can put down up to 16 different schools you want your child to attend and you’ll hopefully get one of them. Most parents put down 10 schools [note this is for elementary school, middle schools and high schools have less choicees]. From comments I’ve read there are many parents who put down 10 schools and didn’t get any of them and ended up having to in some cases drive their kids across town to attend school.

When I was a kid you went to the school in your neighborhood and we had class sizes of around 20-30 kids. We didn’t have any problems back then even though there was talk of over crowding. Then when I was getting ready for fourth grade bussing started which brought kids from bad neighborhoods to good neighborhoods and vice versa. Please note the bold/italics is the equivalent of doing the old finger quotation thing. At least they had bussing to get the kids to school back then. They only have that for kids who are in SDC classes now.

It was not a good time as I was supposed to be sent to Aptos Elementary [note it wasn’t a middle school or Junior High as we used to call them] and my Mother was down at the Board of Education kicking and screaming. In the end I ended up going to Lawton Elementary which was the closest to my house since they split out fourth-sixth grades [elementary schools before that were K-6].

What we have today is similar, but we have managed to fare through it very well. We only put down two schools that had SDC [Special Day Classes] that fit our daughter’s needs. We would have been happy with either. We knew the Kindergarten teacher at her current school and he’s a great guy. We got to meet the teacher at the school closer to us and knew that she mentored some of the people who were therapists for our daughter. Everyone had wonderful things to say all around.

Once we got accepted that’s not the end of things. You have to go to the school and fill out enrollment paperwork. We did that yesterday and after a few hiccups we got everything done. Note to parents of SDC kids, while the paper they send you says you don’t need to bring a birth certificate and proof of residence if you’re already enrolled in the SFUSD, ignore that. They sent us home to bring that back.

My Wife sent an email to the teacher that our daughter will have and she promptly sent back an email saying that she wants to visit our daughter at her school and talk with her current teacher as well as coming by our house to meet with us and see how she is outside of school. Some of you may think this sounds like a Child Protective Services thing, but it’s not. Autistic kids think different than other kids. My daughter can barely talk, but she can make music on her iPad in Garageband with very little help from me. The teacher wants to understand how your child’s mind works so she can incorporate the appropriate classwork into her daily life.

The Principal at the school even remembered us and had a long chat with us while the paperwork was being processes [it turns out she taught at my elementary school and knew many of my teachers. She even tried to flatter me by saying she might have been one of my teachers, but we only had old prune faced teachers close to their 70’s when I was in elementary school].

All in all I knew that it would work out for us. My Wife who worries more about these things is ecstatic at the moment so I’ll just shut my trap and let her enjoy it. Sometimes the world isn’t always out to get you and things work out in the end.

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John Muir Elementary School

John Muir Elementary School offers pre-school for special needs children. You’ve heard me talk about this before, they can be kids with autism, asperger’s syndrome, developmental disabilities, etc. The problem is that John Muir doesn’t have any form of play structure at the school. It is a barebones asphalt yard with a chain link fence around it. Kind of like something you would expect to see in industrial era Russian and not 21st century United States.

John Muir is a part of the Pepsi Refresh Contest where good causes can win $20,000 to help out their cause. I feel that this is a good cause to support. I have seen my daughter at school during recess and she has access to a lot of things to play with and a climbing structure. Children need to develop body strength and they can’t do that through only aerobic exercise of running around in circles. They need to challenge their muscles to help them grow.

They have until September 30th to be in the top 15 vote recipients and I’m sorry I didn’t hear about this earlier or I would have posted something then. There are three ways you can help and none of them should cost you a dime [unless you have to pay for text messaging.]

  1. Go to http://www.refresheverything.com/muirautismplayground and click on the vote button and use your Facebook login to vote.
  2. If you don’t have a Facebook account you can go to the same link and create a Pepsi account and vote that way [even in addition to you Facebook vote]
  3. Text 108702 to 73774

This is something you can do everyday until the end of the week. Pepsi is footing the bill and not your local, state or federal government so the only money is coming from a large corporation. I urge all of you to do this right now and repeat it and pass along a link to this page so that they can get as much help as possible. No child should have to go to a school where they don’t have any place to blow off some steam during recess. The kids will be happier and the Teacher’s will be happier. Let’s see if we can make a change here.

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Playgrounds R Us

Since it’s spring break and our daughter is too young to be running around half naked with drunken frat boys we have to find something to entertain her with. Now that we’re having real weather again in San Francisco we’ve been visiting some of the local playgrounds and have found a few surprises.

This week we went to a playground we haven’t been to in over a year. It’s the Junipero Serra Playground that a block away from the Stonestown Galleria. The nice part about this playground is you can’t see it from any major street. This means that it’s hardly ever crowded. At best there was maybe 12 people at the spot. If you’re a parent of an autistic child this place is a real god send because there’s not a ton of kids running around screaming with joy that can overwhelm your child.

The nice thing about playground today is that they aren’t like the ghetto, industrial playgrounds of my youth. Back in my day [christ I can’t believe I used that phrase] playgrounds were steel, concrete and sharp tanbark. They all looked like something built in cold war Russia. Now they are nice and soft with no sharp pointy things to poke your kids eyes out.

The playgrounds we have today are nice, generally peaceful spots where your kid can run around and well, be a kid. They have much more inviting structures with very little chance for injury and the parents don’t have to keep an eye on their kids as much because if a kid falls you don’t have to worry about a broken tooth or arm because they’re filled with soft puffy foam.

Now this could be construed as a bit of molly coddling for kids and a few people could make allusions to the real world isn’t soft and cuddly, but I don’t think we need to make our kids suffer the harsh realities of the world at a young age. They need a place that they can exercise their minds by making stuff up as they go along. I found myself watching my daughter on the structure in the picture above walking around like it could have been a pirate ship running and jumping and climbing in ways that I wished I could of as a kid.

Then there are people who think the opposite. They aren’t the young kids using their imagination they’re the bored teenage few that don’t have home computers with World of Warcraft to waste their time after school, but can find a way to get their hands on a few cans of spray paint and try to ruin it for the others.

Here was a pretty close to pristine playground except for the sand that always overflows the sand box and a couple of kids had to try and ruin it by leaving their names which no one can read because they lacked proper penmanship and they know that the city lacks the funds to clean up their damage after they’ve finished.

This playground has a really nice rec center, but I’ve never seen anyone inside it or any listing of events here. Around the corner is a set of picnic tables under a well constructed pergola that would be a perfect staging point for a small party. Aside from the graffiti the only thing wrong with this playground was that one of the drinking fountains was backed up. I found a few small sticks that I tried to loosen up the drain with, but it didn’t work. I did notice a guy from park and rec walked around taking pictures and making a few phone calls so hopefully this will be changed in the near future.

Perhaps some of the vandalism is due to the high cost of other attractions around San Francisco that can turn kids minds around. While most of the big attractions in San Francisco have a “Po’ people’s day” where they are open to the masses for free, that also makes them crowded and gives our kids less chance to see and learn from them. Luckily not all playgrounds have been hit with graffiti and vandalism. Today we will stop by another spot that will not have the graffiti and our daughter will have another chance to entertain herself.

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Dealing with Autism…

As most of you are aware my daughter, Becca has been diagnosed with autism. While she is in a classroom for severely diagnosed children with special needs she has been coming along quite well with the ABA therapy she has been receiving. After reading many of the articles out there on autistic children using iPads to communicate and after seeing Rebecca’s reactions to my iPhone she definitely is a techie kid and she loves music.

She was a born musician and loves spending her time banging on the drums that we have gotten her to the point that some of them are a bit worn out now. If we can raise enough money to buy her an iPad 2 we will definitely be getting GarageBand for the iPad because of its built in virtual instruments that will allow a four year old to play the piano, guitar and drums.I also have several programs for my iPhone that she uses to help communicate to us what she wants, but with it’s small screen and her small fingers I think an iPad will work better for her. She still has a few problems with fine motor skills in which an iPhone doesn’t help too much.

I don’t like to ask for handouts, but my wife and I are unemployed at the moment and we cannot afford to purchase an iPad for her. I had google adsense up here and had earned enough to more than cover the cost plus some additional speech therapy, but google has informed me that it’s not giving me the money due to “invalid clicks” which I wasn’t doing and have no control over. I will try to work this out with them, but oddly enough I was notified of this after the first month I was eligible to get money from google, so they have essentially screwed my daughter out of an iPad.

If you could even donate a dollar by clicking on the link below we would greatly appreciate it and I’ll make sure to keep you all in the loop as to how she is progressing with it. I am told that ChipIn lets me check who the donors are and I will give the largest donor a personally autographed copy of my CD, I’ve got a guitar and I’m not afraid to use it! if we collect the money.

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Becca’s Birthday and the SFUSD

Yesterday was my daughter’s fourth birthday and she had a fun party at her pre-school. My daughter was diagnosed with autism right around her second birthday and having to deal with autism in a child can be a struggle. I have to say that the City and County of San Francisco did it right this time. We received early intervention assistance through the Golden Gate Regional Center until she was three. They came daily and worked with her to help her with her speech and behavior and they did a great job.

When she turned three she moved away from GGRC services to the San Francisco Unified School District’s pre-school for children with special needs. This is more than just autistic children, but some who are mentally retarded or physically handicapped so it can be difficult for the teachers let alone with them having to deal with the wide spectrum that covers autism. In looking at the choices that were available to us we finally chose Grattan Elementary School because they seemed to have the best people for the job there.

Well, I have to say that Becca’s teacher Kara is THE super cool pre-school teacher. She is very similar to the teacher’s I had as child with the exception that she’s not a few years from retirement and prune-faced like my teachers were. She’s young and energetic and has the assistance of a few aides to help with some of the more problematic kids. Kara loves all of the kids she teaches and gets to know them all very well and all of their idiosyncrasies.

We brought doughnuts, party hats and horns for the party and the kids couldn’t have been happier. Her friend Jeffrey that she rides to school with every day helped her put on her party hat because he’s the kid who looks over all the other kids in class. Becca’s other friend Brandon showed off by stuffing an entire doughnut in his mouth and eating it without choking.

Kara as well as her aides have had special training in dealing with physically and mentally challenged kids. Autism is kind of hard to explain to some people because they equate it with mental retardation — it’s not. There are lots of people with autistic kids who argue that this thing or that causes autism, but it’s such a wide spectrum of behavior that I can’t put a finger on any one thing and I don’t really want to go there. When you first see our daughter you don’t really notice anything wrong until you notice she doesn’t talk much. She’s getting a lot better at talking now, but to a lot of people she’d just look like a quiet little kid. Little being relative because she’s four feet tall at four years of age.

What is a bit troubling is that the school district doesn’t have the funding to cover the kids needs. Kara gets $5 per child per year. That’s it, nothing else. She has to purchase items for her class out of her own pocket or ask parents to bring in the things she needs. Even though we aren’t floating in money we do what we can to help out. It amazes me how well she is able to do with so little money. It’s just a shame that there isn’t enough money to help our kids get a better education.