Special Needs at Catholic School?

I'm a teacher at a Catholic School and we do offer some help for mild special needs. However, because of budget constraints and a lack of goverment support if a child requires a lot of special education you may need to contact or go to through the local school district for help with that.

My oldest son attended Catholic primary school. My second son started Catholic school, but because he needed speech therapy, we needed to transfer him to the public school. We tried picking him up and taking him to the public school that was about 1/2 mile away and then returning home. Not only was this very hard, since I work full-time, but he was wasting important time and important subjects. Once I transfered him, he improved so much. The two teachers worked together, so that he missed very little. Good Luck

My nephew is LD. He attends Catholic school. The district provided an OT for him and speech for him. The school provides a resource teacher. The school he attends is the school that I attended, my sister, cousins, and my nieces. One of my nieces is borderline gifted, the other is lower average. I personally feel that neither of them got what they should have from their private school. My son has many, many special needs. I could never send him to a Catholic school that didn't have a spec ed dept.

Thank you all for your responses. My thought is that we would likely transfer him if we needed special resources. But since we are in pre-K now, it is hard to know what resources will be needed later on. I've decided to look into both the public and the Catholic school program more closely before deciding where to send him. We would love our children to go to the parochial schools like we did, but have to bear in mind the resources available there. Thanks for your input everyone! Christina

Chiming in a little late... but I think what is available is dependent on the district/state. I had my daughter in public school for K and 1/2 of 1rst grade. Moved her to a small Catholic school on the advice of a psych-ed evaluator. It has worked out beautifully. Also because the way our district is set up, she is getting more resources than she qualified for in the public school. They have identified where her gaps in learning are and are addressing them now while she is still getting good grades, vs the public school in which we would have had to wait until she failed until we could get this amount of help. She currently works with 2 different resource teachers and is pulled from class 3x per week to work on vocabulary, reading and writing. It seems to be working. Her school has 3 different teachers from the county there on: a speech-language therapist, and two different resource teachers. Go speak to the school, see what the resources are and how you go about getting them. We have been able to get these resources without a formal IEP, which was a surprise to me.

Our boys ar eno longer in Catholic School, we started to homeschool 3 years ago now. I have two with learning disabilities and we use Seton homeschool. Throughroughly Catholic in every sense and they have a special services department which is WONDERFUL! The counselors are incredible and they tailor the academics to the child whether its an autistic child, an ADD child, a dyslexic or a downs child.. they are incredible and I know several familes in my area that also use special services for their handicapped children. their web is setonhome.org Pax.. Yvonne