By Reema Amin, Chalkbeat New York, April 30, 2020
After years of searching in vain for the right school for her son, Erendira Matamoros was hopeful she found a good fit.
David, a 14-year-old who is autistic and primarily speaks Spanish, is legally entitled to a small special education classroom led by a bilingual teacher, but that’s hard to come by in New York City. Only about a third of the roughly 5,500 students who required small bilingual special education classrooms this fall were placed in such settings.
After attending three different schools over the past three years, David was admitted this January to a high school program for children with autism. The program is not bilingual, so David was paired with a paraprofessional serving as a translator. The arrangement isn’t optimal — many nights he still needed help translating his homework — but his mother was hoping David would thrive there.
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