Special Ed Shouldn’t Be Separate

In the fall of 2020, as my son and his neighborhood friends started to trickle back out into the world, my daughter, Izzy, stayed home. At the time, Izzy was 3 years old, ripe for the natural learning that comes from being with other kids. I knew by the way she hummed and flapped her hands around children at the playground—and by her frustration with me at home—that she yearned to be among them.

The question of where Izzy would attend school had been vexing me for two years. Izzy had been a happy infant, but she was small for her age and missed every developmental milestone. When she was eight months old, my husband and I learned that she had been born with a rare genetic disorder and would grow up with a range of intellectual and physical disabilities. Doctors were wary of giving us a prognosis; the families I found on Facebook who had children with similar disorders offered more definitive—and doomful—forecasts. When Izzy showed signs of some common manifestations (low muscle tone, lack of verbal communication, feeding troubles) but no signs of others (vision and hearing loss, seizures), I started to lose confidence in other people’s predictions—and to instead look to Izzy as the determinant of her own abilities.

While managing Izzy’s medical care and her therapy regimen, I also started the process of finding her a school in Oakland, California, where we available to her, such as the small family-run preschool in a cozy Craftsman home that my son had attended. Private schools in general have fewer obligations to accommodate students with disabilities—they don’t directly receive government funding and aren’t covered by the federal special-education law that requires the provision of free and appropriate public education. California’s public preschools, at the time reserved largely for low-income families, weren’t an option, either, because our family exceeded the income to qualify.