Dawn and I learned that when you have a child with profound physical and intellectual disabilities, the end of public school — soon after age 21 — is a brusque ejection into an undiscovered country.
On that fateful date, the federally mandated system that kept your child safe and engaged for two decades is over. It’s not exactly like the crisis of your child’s birth — because the end of school hovers on the horizon for years in a cloud of dread — but it’s a crisis nonetheless. The wheelchair-accessible school bus stops coming. Vacation time and sick days start draining away like water from a leaky bucket.
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