The coronavirus crisis has added to the woes of Israel’s special education students and their families, but it’s not the worst of their problems – not even close.“This year, the mess is doubled – multiplied,” said Michael Zats, a lawyer who is the Advocacy Department Manager for Alut, the Israeli society for autistic children. “One thing is clear – no one is thinking about the good of the kids with special needs.”In interview after interview, parents have expressed extreme frustration with what they describe as the “mess” that the special education system is in – only mentioning the virus as an added difficulty, not the core of the problem.Few who do not have children with special needs can comprehend the chaos that families in the system routinely experience, particularly now in August, when many do not even know what school their children go to come September 1, due to a combination of a shortage of classes and what parents call a lack of planning.Yael Josephsberg, chairman of the Alut board, said she has heard of many children in special education who had no placement for the upcoming school year – many of them pupils with autism, for whom stability and consistency are especially important. A query to the spokesperson for the Education Ministry about how many special-needs students lacked a classroom placement as of August 19 yielded no answer, although the ministry responded by saying that all pupils would have a placement by September 1.“It’s like this every year,” said Josephsberg, who has a son on the autistic spectrum. “The special-education system increases every year, especially for those with autism, and these increases have been consistent for decades. But every year, the school system is completely unprepared for the influx of new pupils. They make no plans,” she said.“Our children need to know at the end of the school year what school they will be attending – whether they will be continuing in their school or going to a new one – like all other children.” Dealing with routine issues, such as finding new placements for students who move, are often left to the last minute, Josephsberg said.
And this year, after special-needs children have had to cope with the uncertainty and sudden changes due to the coronavirus crisis, stability is more important than ever.
Alei Siach is a Jerusalem-based nonprofit organization serving people with special needs and their families. Rabbi Chaim Perkal, its founder and the father of two special-needs children, said that, “during the school closures, many parents spoke out about their fears that their children were regressing. For some children with special needs, school is the primary place where therapy happens, where social development happens, where these kids have access to special physical equipment that they need to use.”He added that “families who choose to send their kids back to in-person classes – perhaps because the school is the only place their children have access to therapies and equipment that they benefit from – should be able do so. Families with members in high-risk health groups, who want to err on the side of caution, should not be penalized for that decision. That is also a legitimate choice.”One group that has been impacted especially hard by the virus is special-needs pupils who have been mainstreamed, which is widely considered the most beneficial placement for those children for whom it is feasible. But all agree that for mainstreaming to work, the schools and pupils need support. One way that they get this support is through classroom aides who shadow the children. However, due to the coronavirus, aides were prevented from going to the pupils’ homes to help them with distance learning.“They can’t do the Zoom learning on their own; they need someone to be with them,” said Sivan Veronski, a mother of two children with autism. Although in some cases, children with autism were permitted to go to an empty classroom with their aides, the aides were not allowed to go to their homes so that they could study from home, like all the other children.“That’s segregation,” said Zats. He said that if the rest of the class was studying from home, special-needs students should also have that option. While he said that any teaching aides in high-risk groups should not be required to go to students’ homes during the crisis, he felt that young aides with no risk factors should be allowed to work in pupils’ homes if they agree to, but that the local municipalities were preventing them from doing so.One mother said that coping with this bureaucracy, whether or not there is a global pandemic, is extremely draining. “No one picks up the phone when you call to ask a simple question. Sometimes you just feel like giving up.”