School’s out

It’s the last month of school for many Ontario students, and it’s the last month of Janneke’s last year in elementary school. She’s our youngest child, so this is a significant time for us as a family. We’ve accessed different schools over the years for all four of our children: government-funded systems (public and Catholic) and an independent community-funded system (Christian).

Collaborative Learning

Our adventures with schools have been as unique as our family. Ultimately, each experience has been shaped by the different people (peers & adults) who have interacted with our kids. Specific to Janneke’s years in school, we’ve loved watching classmates respond to her, moving past their own comfort zones. Janneke’s friends have also helped the adults adjust.

Janneke enjoys going to school. She is not inclined to the classroom for too long, preferring to sit at a window or go swimming with a classmate. Thanks to a very committed educational assistant, Janneke has been able to explore life skills like traveling on the city bus and grocery shopping. She loves to do hand-over-hand baking with a classmate, sensing the vibration as the electric blender whirrs through the bowl. Her school promotes learning in community, so she’s also been able to explore kite-making with younger students.

Difficult Lessons Learned

As with Rachel, we’ve observed subtle changes in these last three years of elementary school for Janneke. Classmates, while managing their own developmental changes, are more conscious of neurotypical peer connections and spend less time with Janneke. As blogger Meaghan McLeod writes about raising a child with a developmental disability, “Growing is a process of being increasingly more left behind.”

We wish this process happened differently, but the social changes seem to be the natural response with both children and adults. As Rachel and Janneke age into adulthood, responding to them and involving them comes with a complexity that was less obvious when they were younger. Though we as parents observe this with friends and family, our girls continue to trust with an innocence that makes my heart ache and happy at the same time.

New Chapter

Next steps for Janneke include joining her sister at the local Catholic high school. Rachel’s team is excited to welcome Janneke; we haven’t determined if Rachel shares this joy. We appreciate the creative approach taken with the high school, to find different ways to learn together with the very diverse group of learners in Rachel’s classroom. Janneke will be bringing her love for music, vibration and lights and most likely adding her hollering songs, whether those are welcomed or not. 

Reflecting on these years with our girls in school, I hope for increased awareness of disability and a wider lens to imagine what it means “to do school” for everyone involved. We were created to be interdependent learners, not independent of each other, to grow and learn together. We need each other, a lesson that takes a lifetime to learn.