The finish line, finally

Finding Leah's next school felt a lot like a college search. (The closest we'll ever come to one with this child.) A welcome, if time-consuming, after-effect of Leah's victory in IEP Round 4 was the amount of time we spent fact-finding, and then waiting for gut instinct to take over as we evaluated which place has the best chance of preparing her for the rest of her life.

Up for discussion were three school programs that will likely keep Leah until she's 21. After that, school won't be the center of her life anymore, and her days will need to be filled with something else. We hope a job will be part of that equation, as well as other activities that will make her happy. Overall,  not terribly different from our aspirations for Lauren and Maddie. Certainly this decision felt every bit as significant as the choices we'll help them make as they finish high school.

I've been out of college longer than I care to admit, but I'm not too old to remember what it was like to check out college campuses. I found a few similarities:

Tours. All three schools we visited were happy to show off their facilities. At my alma mater, Notre Dame, the tour highlights included the golden dome, the football stadium, and Touchdown Jesus. I checked out dorm rooms and the student center. For Leah, the classroom highlights were iPads and SmartBoards, and she happily sampled OT gyms and calming areas. The bubble column at Kennedy Krieger was a favorite.

Interviews. Admissions teams want to know all about student strengths and weaknesses. Prospective college students are all about self-promotion. Parents of prospective nonpublic students are all about the weaknesses. It's how we arrive at the application process. Your kid draws bubble guppies all over every other language arts assignment? Tosses Crocs? Flips chairs? Make sure all of it is on the record. While Behavior Intervention Plans (BIPs) are the sole province of the special education school, Notre Dame's Office of Student Affairs probably would have liked one for every student in the school, with provisions like limiting access to beer and the opposite sex.

Life skills. On college campuses, you can usually find professors who seem ill-equipped to function outside the classroom. At least Leah will get some life skills instruction during the week to go along with her academics. Truth be told, Leah is already better with laundry than I was in college. I used to put it off until I'd been through every last pair of underwear. Leah likes to launder every Sunday. (During my years at Notre Dame, the women's dorms came with washing machines. The men's dirty clothes went to St. Michael's Laundry, until it burned down in my junior year. Ha.)

Tuition. Next year, Notre Dame will cost about $57,000 in tuition, room, and board. Nonpublic tuition around here averages more than $65,000. Unbelievably, I found a way to make Notre Dame look like a bargain. The other major difference is that Anne Arundel County Public Schools will be receiving the tuition bills.

The best news is that we found a school we're truly excited about. Leah will start at St. Elizabeth School in Baltimore on May 13. I have no idea what I'm going to do with all the extra mental energy, in the absence of fretting about school. We're definitely ready to return to one IEP meeting per year for awhile.

Onward and upward, we hope.