'This is crisis teaching': students with disabilities are neglected as coronavirus shuts schools
Homeschooling your children during the Covid-19 pandemic(流行病) is hard. For parents whose children have a disability, it's a 'herculean(困难的) task'
As her mom tells it, Sesame Street(儿童节目) is Aubrey's first and only love. Her affection for the program's cast of puppets, for Elmo in particular, is so aggressive and pure that her parents have to restrict her access to it because she gets so peculiar after watching it.
Aubrey, whose real name her parents asked be withheld to protect her privacy, is a 16-year-old student in Los Angeles. As a teenager living with autism(自闭症), routine is the bedrock of her day.
But in the days of a spiraling coronavirus crisis, predicting what comes next is all but impossible. “Think about how we are with uncertainty and multiply it by a million. For her not knowing is almost unbearable,” said her father, Pirouz Kavehpour.
Today, with 124,000 of the nation's schools closed due to coronavirus, Kavehpour has joined the ranks of millions of parents turned into homeschool teachers overnight – no easy feat for any working parent, but especially challenging for parents whose children have disabilities.
It remains unclear when schools across the country will reopen. California officials already indicated they won't restart this academic year and a handful of other states have closed doors until fall. And as classrooms shift to online learning, many of the services guaranteed to the nation's roughly 7 million children with disabilities have been effectively suspended.
Federal law promises to give students educational services that address individual needs. But it's unclear when children with disabilities will get the kind of face-to-face help they had been getting at school before.(Adapted from the Guardian BY Jerry)
