School Hunting

Yesterday Mia and I visited two potential schools for young master Zechariah. We first toured the Mary McDowell Center for Learning, which is on Bergen St. in the neighborhood that we lived in when we first moved to New York. The school was eye-popping, with all of the stuff that you would hope to find for your child. There was a rooftop playground (with a full basketball court) and a big greenhouse, a science lab, art room, music room, computer room, etc. All in all it seemed busy and very academic - all the right stuff was going on and the philosophy behind it all seemed very sound, though with a Quaker twist that did not seem to be too in your face. If Zach could get in, it would certainly be a great environment for him. They say that they do not take "autistic kids," but Zach does not fit so neatly under that label and could qualify. The only catch was that the 5-7 year olds are housed in a nearby site that we were not allowed to see...yet.

From there we went to East 30th Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan, to see the Rebecca School. This school is brand new and just opened in September. It will apparently be the largest school for autistic children in the world (when they reach full enrollment). They seem to have thought of everything though it did not seem to us that they were quite done thinking yet. Parts of the facility were still under construction, although the parts that were finished were beautiful. They have spared no expense (with a $76,000 per year price tag for kindergarten one would hope not) and we even watched one student in the process of filming a scene for a movie, smoke machine and all. We did not, however, get the same feeling of being in an academic environment as we did at Mary McDowell, but that may change as the place fills up. They had a large sensory gym for each classroom (something that the other school lacked) and had far more in the way of speech, OT, PT, etc. which are all things that Zach needs. The philosophy of the school is also quite different and is based on the Floortime DIR model of Dr. Stanley Greenspan, a renowned autism expert (www.stanleygreenspan.com) who is on the board of the school and consults individually on each child’s case/progress. The two biggest plusses for me were that they want the parents to come and spend as much time with their kids at the school (every day even) as they can, and that we could in all likelihood get Zach in (paying for it would require some work, however). The biggest negative for me was thinking of Zach bussing the way in from Brooklyn each day. Hmmmmmmn.
I guess we are thinking of the Rebecca School as a rather expensive “safety school” at this point, but we have several more private and at least two more public schools that we still need to look at. The best thing is that Mia and I were able to put Zach's interests first and work together, even though we are apparently about to duke the divorce thing out in court. There is no love like the love one has for their children. Keep checking back for further developments.