I have been around the mumsnet world since 2010!
I have name changed for this as this could be very outing but at this point we need all the advice we can get!
My eldest son is almost 11 and in the last year of primary, he is diagnosed with severe dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, dyspraxia, low working memory and under assessment for high functioning ASD.
He has struggled so much all his academic life and is currently 4 years behind in English and 3 years behind in maths.
we have been fighting for 5 years for help for him and he has been failed at every turn and finally this year in year 6 at school he was awarded an EHCP plan and this is going in to the school now, but it feels like to little to late he has lost his primary school education time.
last year we got in touch with a specialist dyslexia school and they offered to asses our son and then invited him down for a trial week last October.
The trial was amazing my son came out of the school that first day and said "mummy they are all like me" "they get it" i just sobbed! and even now the memory of that moment makes me cry and it is the main reason why i cannot get this school out of my mind.
This school work on a completely different basis that normal schools they use a different approach and it worked so well for my son and after 7 years of using the normal phonics approach to learning i think a new approach is best as the old one had not worked for him!
Now this specialist school is private they take EHCP plans and use them to pay the fees, now my sons EHCP while funded to £7000 at year no where meets the schools £5000 a term fees (rising to £6000 as they get older).
So we are stuck i am retired on ill health grounds from the NHS and get a small pension, my husband is my carer so we have no available funds to meet those sort of costs. our families do not have this kind of money though i am sure they would help all they could just no one has 1000s laying about!
my son had got in to a good secondary school on the basis of his EHCP but he will have to be separated from all hi peers separate lessons and support as he will be a key stage 1 child working at a year 2 level in a key stage 3 environment
Yet my heart and mind cannot let go that i need to give my son this chance to change is life i need to know i have done everything i possibly can to help him succeed.
so last night while lying awake and stressing again i thought about people who crowd fund or do just giving or go fund me, i googled and saw crowd funding for specialist equipment, charities, cars, homes and even holidays!!
and i though why not why not us to?
so would i be mental to attempt this??
the total cost of his secondary education would be around £84000 taking off the years of his EHCP funding this would reduce this amount to around £45000.
so a £45000 target
when i think that is just 45000 people giving £1 or 90000 giving 50p i would get on my knees and beg everyone of these 90000 to help change my child's life.
so the main question is, is this too grabby? would you do this, should we put ourselves out there for this? and probably some abuse that would come with it??
we don't know what to do?
but we see our son struggle every day and i want to be able to look him in the face when he is older and say i tried everything