Meeting With The School Principal

Now that William is in Kindergarten, his school ends at 2:00 PM instead of 1:00 PM like last year. This conflicts with the Speech therapy at Providence of Speech & Hearing center, which is 1:30 PM every Monday. I planned to pull him out early around 1:00 PM on Mondays to take him to the speech therapy because the speech center doesn’t have any availability to move his session to later time.

So I stopped by the office to talk to Ms. Velado, the Lincoln school principal. At first she said the district will not allow it because it’s the parents responsibility to send their children to school; and we could go to jail if there’s so many absences. I explained to her our situation; she then asked how old is William. ‘He’s 5 now, will be turning 6 on November!’. She then said it’s ok until William turns 6 because the district only enforces the rule for 6 years old and up. So we have about 3 months to pull him out early on Mondays. After that we need to have a solution to our problem. The issue is easy to solve if the Providence center has new available spots; but then after a long day at school, I don’t know if it’s a good idea to send him to speech therapy. 6 hours at school is a long time for a 5 or 6 years old boy.

Lately his speech therapy complains that he doesn’t comply well. So maybe we take a break from speech therapy at Providence center. We still have speech therapy at school; 15 minutes a week.

I’m not sure what to do. It’s a hard decision to make because it’s really hard to get a spot at Providence center; If we give it up, there’s no guarantee that we’ll get a new spot that fits our schedule.