Once our little boy turned 3 he became eligible for pre-school. His pre-school experience will be a little different from his sister. We selected her pre-school. For our son, the state determined where he would be placed after he qualified.
The qualification process was remarkable painless and simple. We had a couple of meetings, first just to provide paperwork and then subsequently for therapists and school officials to evaluate my son to see if he met the criteria required for placement in the pre-school. The evaluation process consisted of various questions that assessed where my son is developmentally and what he is able to do with respect to life skills. Based on the evaluation, my son qualified for pre-school.
Here, the pre-schools for special needs kids are located in regular elementary schools. There are only a handful of schools that have the special needs pre-school or priority pre-schools as they are called. Generally, the child is placed in a pre-school close to his or her home but that is assuming that the class is not full. Thankfully, the school closest to us was not full and my son was able to join an existing class. Interestingly, all the students have special needs, there is no integration at this point. I am hopeful that when he starts kindergarten he will be in a class that has both special needs as well as regular students.
My son started his class the week after he turned 3 and it was so exciting to see him walk into his classroom with his little backpack (that was almost as big as him). We didn't stay for the class because we wanted him to adjust easily and quickly and he did exactly that. We are very blessed that he does not fight change and is in fact very flexible. He had a "great first day" according to his teacher and we are looking forward to seeing how he will develop and progress through the rest of the school year.
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