Ahhhh, summer. The time for lazy mornings, afternoons at the beach, dripping ice cream cones...and new this year, stewing about the upcoming school year! Our school district in Reno is offering families the choice of distance learning or in school learning. (We are supposed to start on August 17th, but I'm betting dollars to donuts that there will be a delayed start to in person learning.) Many parents (and teachers and school staff) are feeling stressed about the upcoming school year, and it doesn't feel like there's a great answer - all of the options have serious pros and cons. This blog post will cover some of my considerations as the parents of a child with special medical and developmental needs, and what we are planning to do about school this fall.[Some caveats: I am very grateful that we are in a position where this is even a choice. I'm not trying to tell anyone else what to do or judge families who go a different route. We're all in different situations and we're all doing our best. This is just a window into one IEP parent's decision making.]
My oldest child, like many kids on IEPs, has both medical and developmental needs. For the past few years, things have been going great. Medically, he's been healthy and stable. We still have quite a few doctor's appointments and medicines, but in general, things have been good. Developmentally and socially, we've seen great progress, and tons of credit for that goes towards our wonderful school and the teachers and staff who care so much about our kids. We've never had to try to decide whether the medical or developmental side is more important.
Enter COVID-19. Now, I'm trying to weigh pros and cons in a comparison that feels apples to oranges, but with both being important pieces of fruit. Developmentally, school provides structure and specialized instruction and therapies and socialization. These things are hard to reproduce at home. We participate in everything we can by Zoom, but a big part of the helpfulness of school is that the child also has to interact with peers, act independently as one of 30 children in a classroom - be pushed out of their comfort zone in ways that I can't replicate at home, and be instructed and supported by adults with masters degrees and years of experience.
Meanwhile, the health risk for medically complex kids is higher. In general, the risk for kids seems to be pretty low and the general advice of the American Academy of Pediatrics is to send kids back to school. But the data is clear across every age group that the medically complex are the most at risk (although, again - medically complex kids still seem to be low risk because kids are so low risk). There's the pediatric inflammatory disease on top of COVID - it seem to be quite rare - but the inflammatory disease also hits medically complex kids harder.
How do you weight these things against each other? Developmental and social skills are very important, and this is the limited window where kids are sponges, soaking up all the things, and where society provides instruction for free via the schools. Medically, the numerical risk is low, but the stakes are high. There's just not a great answer.
We decided to follow our doctors' advice. We talked to both the pediatrician and the pulmonologist this month. They both advised that we should seriously consider keeping J home for the first few months, and if we do that, then we should probably also keep (low risk) Zoey at home for that same time. They took into consideration the following three things: 1) It works with our family / job situation, 2) Josh has asthma and a small airway and a body that is sometimes hit much harder by viruses (I'm not sure that asthma by itself would've been sufficient for this recommendation, since many of you might have kids with asthma - I think it was more the totality of his health situation than the asthma by itself), 3) Nevada caseloads are high. Given these doctor recommendations, we are planning to keep both of our kids home for at least the first few months and do distance learning through their local school. (This is how distance learning went for us in the spring.)
I'm hoping that the situation will change by the next semester (or sooner?!) - that there are better treatments, that there is better containment (at least in Washoe County, hopefully also in the world), that the news coming out of schools is good. We love our school and we love our teachers and barring the current situation, I'd be gladly sending them back to this school community in the fall. I do continue to worry about whether this is the right decision, and I do think there's a good chance that we'll send them back before there's a vaccine or herd immunity, because both of those things seems to be at least 12 months out. (Here's an article I just saw on six reasons for optimism, though!)
Hugs to you parents making this same decision, whether your child has a disability or not. Hugs to all the school teachers and staff, who are going back at risk to themselves, teaching in a whole new environment. Hugs to all the parents who are going to tackle distance learning again, while also balancing a work schedule or babies at home. Someday this will all be a distant chapter...
