The TRENDS podcast is a collaboration between the Community Foundation of Boulder County and KGNU. It dives deep into the community’s most pressing issues and explores the changes happening throughout Boulder County through the experiences of community members, especially those often rendered invisible by commercial media, to shed light on community challenges, solutions, and pathways forward for the county and the country.

Listen to the Pandemic-Related Challenges to Special Needs Education TRENDS podcast episode below:

https://objects-us-east-1.dream.io/kgnu-news/2020/10/10-29-20_TRENDSPodcast-EducationAccess.mp3

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When it comes to education, right now all parents are having to figure out how to keep their children learning and up to date with their academic performance. School districts are doing their best to keep on teaching with the limitations of the pandemic and the new technologies in place.

The coronavirus pandemic has created numerous challenges for families with children with physical, learning and intellectual disabilities. Remote learning is just not suitable for these children.

The Macareno children live in Boulder and each have special needs.

That is the case of the Macareno family in Boulder who have three small children, Daniel aged 9, Gael aged 5, and Miguel aged 3. All three have special needs.

Daniel, a fourth-grader, is on the autism spectrum and his parents are thankful for the support given by all the therapists at his school, Foothills Elementary in Boulder.

Their other sons Gael and Miguel attend Columbine Elementary in Boulder where they also receive special education services.

Octavio Macareno says online learning has been hard for his son Daniel as it is difficult for him to pay attention.

Another complication of online education is how these students access therapies like speech, language and behavior.

Behavior therapy is the most challenging because it requires one-on-one time with a therapist but also socialization with others outside of the family nucleus, something that is not possible during the coronavirus.

A lot of specialists cannot visit one-on-one without becoming vectors for the virus itself. Some of the kids they work with are either medically vulnerable themselves or live in households with medically vulnerable people. That means they are not able to attend school in person at all. But it is incredibly difficult for them to access all that they need to learn, via the computer.

Ailsa Wonnacott, Executive Director of the Association for Community Living (ACL) says they have been fighting for decades to have students with special needs access the appropriate therapies and services. She says the pandemic has set their work behind by many years.

“So it's very difficult to find ourselves back in this situation where we're trying to, again, look at environments that are not designed with students with disabilities in mind and figure out how are they going to be included and how much is the community and the system going to step forward and be there part of the solution.”

The ACL is a civil and human rights group that was established in the 1960s in response t...