Wednesday, January 9, 2013
School Board hopes to avoid more layoffs next year, begins discussion on how to best address increasing needs.
Students are only halfway through the 2012-13 school year, but Elmhurst Unit District 205 Board members already are looking ahead to next year. Predicting enrollment and staffing needs for 2013-14 is kind of like looking into a crystal ball, but it's a necessary exercise to get the next budgeting cycle started. "It is very early to try to do these kinds of projections. That is the caveat," Superintendent David Pruneau told the School Board Tuesday. Best estimates show enrollment remaining flat at York High School and at the district's eight elementary schools, he said. "As a matter of fact, the majority of elementary schools are seeing slight decreases," Pruneau said, adding that spikes in enrollment might be seen later by grade level. …
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
How I learned the hard way to put a protective password on all of my electronic devices.
Chiot, puppy, murphy, Zhu Zhu, giochi preziosi, chien, dog. That’s what the eBay invoice said that appeared in my inbox from out of nowhere. I engage in quite of bit commerce on eBay, but almost exclusively as a seller of wares. I’m not used to getting invoiced. Must be a mistake, I thought. Until I opened the email, and then I knew exactly what had happened. My daughter had made a purchase on eBay. She’d gone and helped herself to a fluffy-eared little minx of a Zhu Zhu puppy named Murphy. From France. For 30 Euro. That’s like $10,000 right? As I’ve written about previously, I am the anti-hoarder. I have the constant urge to purge and, as such, always have something posted on both eBay and Craigslist at any given time. So naturally I am…
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
The only people responsible for perpetuating “The Mommy Wars” are mommies themselves.
I’m sure by now that most of you have seen Time magazine’s latest cover story, with its provocative photo of a nubile young MILF breastfeeding her nearly 4-year-old son alongside the headline, “Are You Mom Enough?” The photo and accompanying article have bloggers and pundits everywhere lamenting over this re-ignition of The Mommy Wars, in which mommies are pitted against one another based on differing parenting philosophies, breastfeeding habits, working versus staying at home, etc. But in my experience, the only people responsible for perpetuating The Mommy Wars are mommies, themselves. One of the singularly most miserable experiences of my life was when I decided to join a new mothers’ group shortly after my daughter was born. I was …
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
The happiest place on earth turned terrifying when I lost track of my kid.
My daughter likes to run around. Back and forth. Forth and back. In circles. Arms flailing. Hoppity hopping. She will impulsively run towards water in any form, with fountains being a favorite. You know that dog in the movie Up who completely loses track of his mission when anyone so much as says the word “squirrel”? That’s my daughter. Fountain! Pond! Waterfall! Sprinkler! You know where there are lots of fountains? Disneyworld. Where we just returned from after a mostly blissful week spent in their fine parks. You know what there is also a lot of at Disneyworld? People. Swarms and swarms of people that get in-between me and my kid when she darts off. Memo to the world: It does not count as “cutting” when I try to get around you and your …
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
But am I counting the days in anticipation or just marking time until my eventual demise?
When I first entered the workforce, back in ye olde 1980s, the Interwebs did not exist. There was no Facebook or Twitter, no online shopping or eBay, no TMZ or People.com. I’m not sure that we screwed around any less at work than people do today, so I won’t go off into one of those “in my day…” rants. We were just limited to killing time with actual, rather than virtual, people and activities. If I wanted to gossip about people behind their backs, I had to do it with co-workers. Or call my friends who were also in dead-end entry level jobs. You just had to keep your eye on the opening-to-your-cubicle-which-cannot-really-be-called-a-door in case the boss happened by so you could bust out some officious-sounding convo, which was the '80s …
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Explaining death to a child is never easy, but especially fraught for parents of children with autism.
Last fall I wrote about parenting advice columns and how foreign and inapplicable the content was for special needs parents. But even when advice is supposedly specifically tailored to parents of children with autism, it can be laughably off-base. Take this article about explaining the death of a loved one to a child with autism. This one hit close to home because my father died about a year and a half ago. Also just recently my daughter’s BFF Grace, who is also on the autism spectrum, experienced death for the first time. In her case, it was her elderly neighbor Harry whom she barely had any contact with except for when he chased her away from his bird bath. But that didn’t stop her from becoming completely obsessed with his sudden …
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Finally, one of my autistic daughter’s fixations has morphed into something constructive.
High on the list of autistic traits are “narrow interests,” which can range from the fairly benign, like a nerdlinger obsession with American presidents and dinosaurs, to the mildly annoying, like Thomas the Tank Engine, to the more, shall we say, impactful, like dismantling toilets. There is virtually no obsession too esoteric that it cannot be indulged today via the Internet, specifically sites like YouTube. We have many little friends that are into elevators, and you would be amazed at how many videos can be found of random people riding elevators … and helpfully telling you details about them. Suffice to say that if I ever find myself at the Tanglewood Mall in Roanoke, VA, I will never have to wonder if their JC Penney has a Dover …
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Two weeks of unstructured free time can be an autistic kid's worst nightmare. Not to mention their parents'.
Although the weather doesn’t seem to indicate it, we are smack in the middle of the winter school break. School children everywhere get two to three weeks off to…I don’t know, what are they doing? Playing with their Christmas toys? Nah, that was over about five minutes after they opened them. They sure aren’t tobogganing or building snowmen, at least not in this part of the country. I guess the only certainty is that they are all enjoying not being in school. But not so much for most children with autism. See, autistic kids love nothing more than their routine, and winter break leaves them all kinds of out-of-sorts. Two weeks of unstructured time off without the benefit of their usual, predictable schedules can be their worst nightmare…as…
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
The Penn State scandal raises awareness of predators who target at-risk and vulnerable children.
Like everyone else, I watched in horror last week as the events unfolded in the child sex abuse scandal at Penn State. For parents of young children, it is unfathomable to contemplate something like this happening to your own child. Unfortunately, it is more common than we’d like to believe. Statistics show that around 15 percent of children are sexually abused before the age of 18. For girls, it’s more like 30 percent. And for developmentally disabled girls? 83 percent. 83 percent? 83 percent. Since this is a Patch opinion article, and not a research white paper, I won’t be footnoting the source for that statistic. But I could. It’s a statistic that I’ve heard thrown around a lot since I became the parent of a developmentally disabled …
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
A special needs parent obsessively tracks the ages and stages of typically developing children.
I like to torment myself sometimes by reading parenting advice columns. As the parent of a special needs child, I like to see how the other half lives and make sure that my “Nice Problems to Have” file is never depleted. Whereas parents of typically developing children might worry about their kids being overly influenced by friends, parents of kids with autism would be happy if there were friends. Siblings that are constantly fighting? Be happy that they acknowledge each other’s existence. I’m thinking of introducing an advice column where questions like these are fielded by a panel of special needs parents. Here’s how it could work, using actual questions that I’ve recently read: My 4-year-old is terrified of water. How can I coax him …
RMS
6:49 am on Friday, March 1, 2013
Everyone has lost focus here. What is going to happen to the teachers in the schools where enrollment is down? I know one school in particular where there is going to be a need for only (4) 4th grade teachers where there is currently 5 and next year the same will apply to the fifth grade etc... and it will snow ball as enrollment continues to decline Where are these teachers going? We can fill … more ›