I meant to blog about this last week but need more time to do some research. I haven’t lived in New York for six years and am not totally up to date on the education regulations there any more. But this recent development shocked me and it most definitely needs to be talked about.
So I was glad to see that my college classmate Andrea has posted a letter to Governor Spitzer addressing her concerns about the NY Board of Regents and Department of Education’s reinterpretation of the federal IDEA law. Their recent ruling, if you haven’t heard, will deny free, public-school-provided special services like speech therapy and OT to homeschooled children in New York State. These services will continue to be available to children enrolled in public and private schools.
These special services are paid for by the taxpayers. In other states, the public schools are required to provide the same special services to homeschooled and private-schooled children as they do to public-school students. Federal law mandates this. It is under this law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, that Wonderboy is able to receive necessary speech therapy and audiology services through our local school district, even though we are officially registered as a private school under California education regulation.
Andrea speaks eloquently to the importance of such services:
I am not a zealot. I am a concerned parent who, at great personal and
financial sacrifice, is trying to provide her two, exceptional children
with the tools needed to become life-long learners and independent,
creative problem-solvers capable of living their lives to the fullest
their capabilities allow…This
act by the NYS Ed. Dept. (revoking services to home schooled IEP kids)
feels like a slap in the face for families whose financial and emotional resources are already spread thin to breaking.
Andrea suspects that the policy change has more to do with funding problems than anything else. No matter what the cause, it is hard to believe that the state would choose to interpret the federal law in a manner that excludes homeschoolers but includes privately schooled children. This is stunningly inconsistent.
January 20, 2008 @ 11:45 am | Filed under:
Bloggity This blog is three years old today. I guess that means I’m entering my senior year of blogging?
I was going to do a whole big retrospective thing, but I can see I’m not going to have time. So I think I’ll just commemorate the occasion by pulling some highlights out of the archives. Oh, but first, I wanted to mention a few changes in the sidebar. If you read Bonny Glen in a feed reader (I just typed "feader"—is that a word yet? Nope, looks like it’s just a surname) you may not have noticed the tweaking I’ve been doing. I moved all the stuff about me, my family, or this blog itself to the left sidebar, and below that are some link lists and booklists.
In the righthand sidebar I’ve added a section called "Recently Read," which is subdivided into Books (my GoodReads widget), Links, and Posts. The Links section is a widget that posts my del.icio.us links. More on that in a sec. The Posts section is my Google Reader "recently shared posts" widget. These are posts from blogs I subscribe to, posts which have particularly caught my eye.
So if you want to know what I’ve read on the web lately that I found especially thought-provoking, moving, funny, or interesting, the Recently Read links and posts section of the sidebar is where to look.
But I know most people nowadays seldom click through to the actual blog! I know I rarely do, for blogs to whose feeds I subscribe in a reader. The reader is what makes blog-reading remotely possible for me in these days of many demands on time and too much good stuff to read. There are a few blogs that are such tranquil, lovely spaces I do always click through to read "in person," but for the most part, I am glued to my Google Reader.
(Of course some of you bloggers out there don’t publish full feeds, only excerpts, so I have no choice but to click through to read your entire posts. I don’t hold that against you. When I blogged at Lilting House, ClubMom required me to publish excerpts only. They needed the page views to generate revenue; ad sales, of course, were what funded their whole MomBlog program. So I understand about blogging for income and needing those click-throughs, and I’m happy to click through and help. If you’re a for-love-not-money blogger, however, and you choose to publish full feeds to the readers instead of excerpts, thank you thank you thank you.)
Anyway, since I know many of my readers probably only click through once in a while, I’ve decided to try out daily auto-posting of my del.icio.us links. That way I can share good stuff quickly, easily, and no one has to actually click through to find out what interesting web-goodies have most recently jumped out me. Enjoy!
Back to the sidebar. Below the Recently Read bit is my big category cloud—and yes, I know my categories are something of a mess right now; when I imported Lilting House into this blog, I realized I’d used slightly different category names over there, so now I have redundancies like "Special Needs Kids" and "Special Needs Children"—doh!) and below that, some assorted tidbits including the Cybils widget. Below that comes the Tidal Learning nearcircle widget, and that’s pretty cool because it updates regulary with chunky excerpts from all the blogs in the circle.
So there you have it. There are lots of other odds and ends tucked into these old sidebars, but the Recently Read section is my favorite.
When I began blogging here three years ago, my intention was to have a central place to share answers to the questions I was getting swamped with via email—questions about my books and questions about homeschooling curricula and methods, mostly. I quickly discovered, as so many bloggers do, that this medium is wonderful for capturing family memories: the quick funny story, the poignant moment, the killer one-liner that you would never remember if you didn’t write it down. So it wasn’t long before my children took over this space: more than anything, this blog is about them. Us. Our family.
My favorite posts are the funny ones. Those are the ones I go back and reread quite often. These people really do crack me up. The woset in the cwoset thing makes me burst into giggles at random moments. Of course "Who’s on Surp" is probably the funniest of my funny kid stories. "Ha! I surped!" is still an oft-heard triumphant exclamation around here. (Along with the aggrieved outcry, "Mom, she’s smugging again!"—as in, ‘she ‘surped my spot and is looking smug about it.’)
This post narrated one of my favorite Rose and Bean moments.
This was a pretty exciting moment.
I see I’ve been complaining about long doctor’s-office waits since 2005.
Once, just once, I served cherry cobbler for breakfast.
Sniffle. I just got all nostalgic over this "day in the life" post from March of 2005.
I answered people’s questions about writing here.
I went crazy for strawberries.
I dazzled the world with my awesome homemaking skills.
I melted over this picture by Beanie.
I rhapsodized about quiet time.
I started the Carnival of Children’s Literature. (New one goes up tomorrow, by the way. Check it out at Wizards’ Wireless.)
I gabbed about lots of other things, but if I don’t go get ready for Mass we are going to be late and it will be all my fault and I’ll have to write another post about embarrassing moments at church. So I’ll just end this with a big THANK YOU to all of you who keep on coming to visit me here in the Bonny Glen!
Ah, yes, it was that kind of a week. Kids with colds, one kid who seemed to be coming down with a tummy bug but mercifully did not, an IEP meeting, an interminable appointment at the children’s hospital, where the parking lot is under construction.
But also: a week in which good books were read, and funny pictures drawn, and a cunning turquoise case crocheted for my cell phone by an enterprising daughter.
What I love about this homeschooling life is that even the bad weeks are pretty darn good.
It’s January, and we are back in our semi-annual Ambleside groove. (Also known, hereabouts, as "high tide.") Jane is reading the books on the Year 7 list this year, and since I have read few of them myself, I’m ‘doing’ Year 7 too, and I’m loving the books and the conversation. This life is an autodidact’s dream. I’m put in mind of a story my gorgeous friend Tracey used to tell: how she wasn’t able to go to college right out of high school, and she used to pray for the opportunity to someday continue her education. Then she got married, and she had a baby, and another, and she was delighted to be able to stay home with her little ones. She and her husband decided to homeschool the kids, and the oldest daughter was halfway through first grade when it struck Tracey: that old prayer had been answered. She was reading A Child’s History of the World to her daughter and learning much that she hadn’t known before.
"That’s when it hit me," she deadpanned, telling me this story years ago: "God did let me continue my education. He just figured I needed to start over at kindergarten!"
So here I am, reading Churchill’s history of Britain with my 12 year old, discussing Caesar’s assumptions about the island he was about to invade, and I’m thinking the whole time, I am the luckiest person alive. This is not, mind you, what I was thinking when we spent 45 minutes sitting in an exam room waiting for the doctor to show up, nor during the 20 minutes after the doc’s visit when we had to wait for the nurse to write up the lab slips so that we could spend another 35 minutes sitting in the lab waiting room. Beanie is quite correct in pointing out that my attitude became something less than cheerful during those long, long, long waits. And I wasn’t even the one getting jabbed with a needle.
But the books, the lively discussions, the sketchbook drawing of a blue-and-orange house wren (Bean opts for excitement over accuracy in her nature drawings), the words that fly over yarn and flashing hooks: this is what sticks with me, this is the rich life.
Says Beanie, with a big hug: "Mommy, I want to model you in everything. Well, except for the grumpiness."
Ouch! LOL!
(It was that kind of week. Too many doctor trips lately!)
Passing this on FYI, and no I don’t get a commission from these folks:
All
Signing Time VHS Tapes are $5 for educators and professionals now
through February 15th!
We are closing out our VHS products and want to give all educators and professionals the first opportunity to order them online at the closeout price of $5! We
will not reorder VHS tapes in the future and quantities are limited to
stock on hand. Order soon because at these prices, your favorite videos
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I assume "educators" means homeschoolers too. If you don’t have any Signing Time, I most heartily encourage you to remedy that!
Previous posts about Signing Time:
It Must Be a Sign
Something Else to Buy Instead of Curriculum
Poetry Friday is hosted by Farm School this week. I found myself in (as often happens) an Elizabeth Bishop mood. Here is her villanelle, "One Art."
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
Read the rest here.
January 11, 2008 @ 12:02 am | Filed under:
Friends After looking at yesterday’s photos, Mary Beth wanted to know if Rilla ever gets a chance to wear that oh-so-fetching pink hat here in sunny San Diego. Listen, that hat is so darn cute it’d be worth running the air conditioner in winter to lower the temp enough to chill a baby’s ears. Fortunately, our nights here on the edge of the desert can be quite brisk, almost what you Easterners call nippy. We’ve even had a few days lately where we had to wear long sleeves. On Christmas Eve, when we drove up to that little mountain town, we thought about bringing jackets just in case, but they were all buried under our surfboards and beach towels, so it’s a good thing I had these scrumptious knitted caps on hand for the three younger girls. And credit for that goes totally to (whom else?) Alice. She called me one day last month especially to tell me Hanna Andersson had the world’s cutest hats marked down to a ridiculously low price and I hung up on her to get my order in rightaway. As always, she was one hundred percent correct. Cutest hats ever.
