DS goes to a Title 1 school. About half the schools in our district are Title 1. The neighborhood school DS would have attended if he were typically developing is not Title 1. But that school does not have the special education services DS needs. Talking with teachers and a lot of other parents in our district (family members, neighbors, friends, parents of other special needs kids), it seems that the Title 1 schools offer more special education services. Interestingly, they also have better gifted education programs. There is more academic diversity within these schools. When we experimented with mainstreaming DS, we were concerned that he would be singled out by getting pull-out services. However, we discovered that so many kids get pull-outs for therapies, resource room, Title 1, or gifted services that it's a very common thing and all the students just accept the fact that some kids leave the regular classroom at times for special instruction. This is very different from what parents at the non-Title 1 schools tell us. In our district all of the special ed classrooms (like the autism classrooms, the communication impaired classroom, the multi-handicapped classroom, etc) are all at Title 1 schools. This means that these schools also have more speech therapists, OTs, PTs, and school psychologists than the non-Title 1 schools. That's how it is in our district. Other districts may be different.
Gena
DS, age 11 and always amazing
“Autistics are the ultimate square pegs, and the problem with pounding a square peg into a round hole is not that the hammering is hard work. It's that you're destroying the peg." - Paul Collins, Not Even Wrong