Oh thank you so much for taking the time to think about my son’s situation. I cannot tell you how supported I feel by reading your questions and comments. I asked the exact same questions to the district student services, superintended, Special Ed director, School Principals, School Counsellors…all of them are mute! When meeting in person, which was once back in early October, Student services director said, “those are all great questions” and wrapped up the meeting without any answers!
I asked, one hour/day = one day of attendance?? How can the ever be sufficient? Plus the Home and Hospital Instruction is implemented differently in each school district (CA dept of education advised me of it). So in our district, a para-educator would come home for 1 hour/day, 5 times/week or make it easy for themselves and come over twice a week for 2.5 hours each to count towards the 5 hour/week rule. This person would be a volunteer, or retired community member or teacher if we get lucky, but will not teach anything. Their job is to deliver the school work assigned by the class teacher, gather the assignments finished by the student and pass them to the teacher, and administer tests. So I asked who will tutor the student then, and I got no answer! I said, if he were able to self study and keep up with school work independently and be tested, then he would be back in school! Exactly as said above, how is it possible for someone with a brain injury to take off and run along independently with this bogus service called Home and Hospital instruction, without any teaching service from school? Got no answer from anyone in the school. Then I came across somewhere that Home & Hospital Instruction is meant to “minimize loss of education” when the student is out of school due to health reasons, which means it is a given that a student if struck by misfortune to fall ill enough to not be able to attend school, then they are sure to lose their futures and high school goals, whether or not their disability be temporary! You are right, this is simply a check mark item, not really meant to help a student. However, there are some school districts whose HHI is a robust program and can actually help. Some have online learning system available to students but what if the student is medically not able to look at computers or do school work online? Then they seem to provide for private tutors, but this comes after a legal battle and we have to find a lawyer who would be willing to take up a case against public schools. Also, HHI does not support student with higher level subjects…so no APs or Honors, no World Languages beyond level 2, no lab sciences since the student is not allowed to go to school! Basically, it is pretty useless, even if a child were capable of benefiting from such instruction…well I’m not sure why would they call it as “instruction” when they don’t really provide any instruction!!!
We are considering Independent study at Charter school, but even there they get to meet an advisory teacher one in 2 weeks and then have to do all of the study at home, using books or if the student is able to tolerate devices, then online tutoring. The independent study program in our district is useless…provide very minimal courses, and no higher level ones.
There is really no easy way out of this situation. There are gaps in services in the school district, which they won’t acknowledge. I’ve tried to ask for leave of absence (which CA dept of edu does not allow for Medical reasons!!!), yet I just hoped this maybe a way to get him time to recover from the injury and then get back to school. I hope it works…so far the school district is mute on it as well!