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Hey gang, If you have time (right!!), can you give me a quick one-paragraph explanation of what you offer for children in your church with special needs? Background The issue that we are struggling with is what to do with our older children. We have one 14 year old girl that needs one-on-one care and is very disruptive with other children. So, we isolate her in our Special Needs classroom, even separate from other children with Special Needs. The volunteer that so faithfully ministers to her is very capable but adding more children to the mix would be too much for everyone. At a different service we have a 17 year old girl who also has a history of getting a little too physical, and we try to keep her in the SN classroom for the duration of the service. Questions 1. How many of you main-stream these children (from autistic to severe retardation) in your ministry 2. Do you feel it's a mistake to have just one child in this classroom per service: would you recommend opening up the room to a group of children instead? 3. What criteria do you use to mainstream-or-not? 4. What age is your cut-off age? Do your 12 year old Special Needs children now fall under Student Ministries? Thank you for your time!!!
Lisa B from NC
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1. How many of you main-stream these children (from autistic to severe retardation) in your ministry We only main stream. 2. Do you feel it's a mistake to have just one child in this classroom per service: would you recommend opening up the room to a group of children instead? The girl you are talking about presents safety challenges. I think the "oughtness" of her placement has a lot to do with the parent and the child's goals. If they are good with one-on-one attention-- and you can sustain it, (God bless you), you are fine. 3. What criteria do you use to mainstream-or-not? That's our default option. We encourage families to build church into the Wrap Around plan. A good strength-based treatment plan will account for the socialization that church provides as well. Church in a treatment plan also demonstrates a plan culturally customized. We encourage Mental Health providers to send services to Grace. Many times the one-on-one support is provided by a Therapuetic Staff Support from a local agency and not one of our volunteers. 4. What age is your cut-off age? Do your 12 year old Special Needs children now fall under Student Ministries? We value customization, so we make individual plans with the family to determine the cut off. In the past, teens with Ausbergers became preschool assistants. Others choose to advance to youth group. Best. Larry
Lisa B from NC
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Christiaan, Its good to hear from you again. We are in the process of just starting a Special Needs Children’s Ministry in our church (1,800 size). We have about 10 special needs children that we know of from nursery – 6th grade. I remember when one severely challenged boy was twelve his parents removed him from the class as he would be disruptive. Now he sits in church with them. For the most part we have tried to mainstream the special needs children but try to provide a one on one care for them in the cl. Some bring their own therapist with them and just follow along with what the class is doing. I would not want to separate the children as I think they need to feel part of the church family. I also always try to get the parents of the special needs child to come and talk to the other children in the class and explain to them the needs of the child and how they can minister to them. God bless you as you reach out to these special children. Nancy
Lisa B from NC
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Hi Christiaan, Questions 1. How many of you main-stream these children (from autistic to severe retardation) in your ministry? We main-stream as many as we safely can. We have a special needs room where they start our with a circle time and then we move them to main stream rooms as possible. We have 2 boys (10 and 16) who are not able to be in main-stream rooms. We also just took on our first adult, a 37 year old with downs syndrome. 2. Do you feel it's a mistake to have just one child in this classroom per service: would you recommend opening up the room to a group of children instead? As mentioned we have a groups (we serve 10 clients at present) 3. What criteria do you use to mainstream-or-not? Safety and behavior. If they get over stimulated in the classroom then we bring them back to the support room. 4. What age is your cut-off age? Do your 12 year old Special Needs children now fall under Student Ministries? We had a cut-off at 12 years old and blew past is when our first student turned 13. Now he is 16 and we just took on an adult. They are kept under the children’s ministry as all my volunteers have come from the children’s ministry. We are very blessed in that we have a phenomenal professional volunteer staff assisted by a team of patient, teachable, loving helpers. My wife is the director of the department and is a special education teacher. Her coordinators are a husband and wife team. Elissa is an occupational therapist (PhD) and Todd is a special education phys. ed. and early elementary teacher. We also have a speech pathologist and two trained paraprofessionals. Backing this up are 12 volunteers who actually do the hard work serving as one-on-ones for each child. Their training consists of 1 month of observation with a trained one-on-one followed by one month of hands-on assisting that one-on-one, and then one month of observed serving overseen by a professional staff volunteer. We have learned a whole lot by trial and error and also a got a great deal of affirmation by looking over Anita Weldon’s (North Ridge Church) material from their special needs ministry. If we can help you in any way please let me know. Mike
Lisa B from NC
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1. How many of you main-stream these children (from autistic to severe retardation) in your ministry We mainstream all our special needs children. We customize their care based on the need of each child. Some children need one on one care so we provide a volunteer (most are special needs teacher in our area) that can meet the need of the child. Others simply need additional resources during different segments of our program. For example, during small group some kids need more tactile involvement so we provide their small group leader with the tools needed for that child. We also have sign language available in our elementary ministry for large group and small group because we have a couple of kids that are deaf that recently started attending. We have found that parents of special needs children are talking at schools and in their neighborhoods about our church because we try to meet the individual needs of each child. As a result we've seen our ministry to special needs children nearly double in the past year. 2. Do you feel it's a mistake to have just one child in this classroom per service: would you recommend opening up the room to a group of children instead? Because each child's need is different, we do not offer a specific room for special needs children. Instead, we train and equip volunteers to meet their individual needs within our existing programs. 3. What criteria do you use to mainstream-or-not? Our main criteria is that fact that each special needs child is unique and has different needs. We mainstream b/c we do not want a "one size fits all" special needs program. 4. What age is your cut-off age? Do your 12 year old Special Needs children now fall under Student Ministries? We have seen our special needs volunteers that follow kids into our student ministry. Most of our kids move up with their class into our middle school ministry. Eric
Lisa B from NC
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