Dara, I would highly recommend home-schooling while you wait to get some more appropriate placement.
It is my understanding that Special Education SHOULD be available through your public school system. To NOT have it available publicly, is a breach of internationally accepted anti-discrimination legislation.
Sammy reminds me so much of difficult child 3 at that age. In pre-school he also couldn't sit and participate - he simply didn't understand the language of what was happening around him. When the kdis were all sitting still and listening to a story being read, difficult child 3 was bored because:
1) there were too many distractions from the shufflings, the sublte noises and movements of the other kids, which had more meaning to him than the meaningless syllables coming from the teacher;
2) the story was simply not able to be understood by difficult child 3 - he didn't have sufficient language capacity, he is highly visual as a learner and STILL prefers to watch TV with subtitles even though his hearing is fine;
3) he has ADHD as well and fidgets physically the more anxious and unsettled he feels;
4) he is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and picks at things around him, lines things up (including grains of sand o nthe floor) and in general, was simply not able to pay attention.
So the pre-school tried several things.
First, they had a special towel (difficult child 3 loved the feel of towelling) which he could sit on and also hold, at circle/story time. Then he had an aide sitting with him whose job it was to take him away outside when his fidgets were getting too disruptive.
Third - difficult child 3 was hyperlexic. So they would ENGAGE him by getting HIM to read aloud, especially reading out the names of classmates at roll call time. This also helped by showing the other kids that difficult child 3 was not simply a naughty kid or a 'slow' kid, but was in realty very bright.
However, if we had decided to keep difficult child 3 in pre-school until he could sit still in circle time - he would still be there at 15!
Some things are not worth trying to completely fix. better to get close, find other ways to manage, and move on. Otherwise EVERYTHING stagnates.
Dara, you can throw money at this, and not fix it. You can sometimes find a good fix in other ways. Yes, often you can find some help by spending money. If we had paid for an aide privately, difficult child 3 would have had better support in mainstream school and we could have even bypassed the bullying problems (which pushed his anxiety through the roof and made learning a joke, too hard for him to take information on board when he was anxious). But we still would have had a kid who simply wasn't able to learn as effectively, in the mainstream setting.
When we were starting difficult child 3 in Kindergarten, we were offered a place in a Special Education autism class. We also chose to not take up that offer right then, for the same reasons - difficult child 3 was a mimic and was learning appropriate behaviour by copying other kids and adults around him. We didn't want him learning stims and odd noises etc from autistic classmates. (I also had concerns about how effective was their playground supervision, difficult child 3 was a potential runner - he would see a flock of seagulls, for example, and chase them onto a road without realising; I was concerned that teachers mightn't be in a position to stop this).
We chose to start difficult child 3 at the local mainstream school. Government school. They put on an aide for him, we had regular Learning Team meetings when we would discuss his progress and compare notes on how best to help him. His Kindergarten teacher was lovely, but wasn't able to teach him much. Frannkly, in all his years in mainstream, he learned more from me at hoime after school and on the weekends, than he did in school. This was a kid who started school able to read aloud fluently and doing simple maths, while his classmates were still learning C-A-T and how to recognise written numerals. However, difficult child 3 was still partly non-verbal, he had significant language delay and didn't understand some very basic concepts. He had to be spoken to in a very careful, ritualised way for him to understand. And he still couldn't sit still at circle time - his aide had to sit with him and work hard to keep him on task. Finally a coping method was put in place which followed him through the rest of his mainstream attendance - he needed to always have a place provided, where he could go and do his work on his own away from the rest of the class. For a few years this place was the veranda of the classroom. That was the most successful. In later years there wasn't enoguh of an escape area, and he got very little work done and was so anxious he missed weeks and motnhs of school attendance. That was when we really could see - when he was home "sick" (as we thought) he was getting ten times the amount of school work done.
Dara, I think you need to be given information on what is avialable. And if options you feel he should have, are NOT available in your area - then Sammy is being discriminated against. He is entitled to have access to an education. He shouldn't be held back simply because he can't sit still!
We went through this with difficult child 1 also. And evne easy child, to acertain extent. She was a very bright child, but labelled as "immature" by her teacher and downgraded into a lower class simply because she was bored. Downgrading her only made her boredom worse until she was a big behaviour problem. I finally transferred her to another school where they noted two things:
1) She had regressed academically (they had taught her two years earlier, claimed she had made no progress since they had her there before despite two years' alleged advancement)
2) She was a bright child who needed stilumation and once they gave it to her agian, she rapidly made up lost ground.
difficult child 3 is very like easy child. We fond with both, we need to keep them surrounded by stimulation. Our home has been called "an enriched learning environment" and frankly, it is how we have coped. Walls are covered in Escher prints, learning sheets, encouraging notes and interesting pictures. Puzzles everywhere. We played chess with the kids from pre-school. The kids have had access to computers since we got the first one when easy child 2/difficult child 2 was a toddler. We invested in simple educational software for them and let them play (with supervision). difficult child 3 was therefore using a computer from infancy.
With Sammy's history, such stimulation has got to help his brain recover from the damages he's experienced. We know just how amazing the brain is; it's taking the "use it or lose it" a few steps further, to "let's make it happen".
To begin your own "walls of enrichment" may I suggest the following phrase - "Do the best you can with what you've got"?
And look around. Make things happen. You may find home-schooling, at least for a year, less stressful than the current hassles. I especially love the portability.
Example - last week I declared a school excursion day and we took along some home-schooling neighbour kids. We studied local forest types and I quickly prepared some notes for them. But it was very hands-on, we had a ball and the kids picked up a great deal. We were also outdoors. The kids felt the salty mud of a mangrove swamp. tasted the salt on the leaves. Then in the rainforest they burrowed their hands into the leaf litter and felt the coolness underneath.
We have so many resources around us that we never use.
Oh, and the cost of our excursion - just the fuel getting there. And the burgers we had for lunch on the way to the coal seam and the rock platform.
Marg
Don't despair. Get proactive and start looking around at appropriate classes for Sammy for next year.
