Re//Dallas Area info

[Guest guest]

O.K.

My husband works for Texas Instruments in Dallas.

We live in Lavon. www.goffhomes.com if you are interested. We were looking

at houses and found one we loved, but just didn't feel right. So we looked

up the house address in county records to see who the builder was so we

could look them up online and see if they were building anywhere else. We

found Goff Homes. We checked the BBB online and they had a bad report. When

I called the BBB they said it was a computer mistake and Goff was fine. We

have lived here for 2 years and LOVE it!!!!! It is very slowly growing.

There are a lot of lots available. They are having better luck building and

then selling instead of having people interested in building. The people who

take turns working at the model home are people who live in this community!

Everyone is super friendly! And if you bought this same house in Plano it

would cost you twice as much!!!! The most exciting thing is that they just

sold the house to the right of us and accross the street from us. We got 2

families of new neighbors in the same week and they are wonderful! One

family has 2 boys (soon to be 6 and 7 ) they are wonderful with my 5 year

old daughter and my 6 year old pretty severe autistic son. The other family

has an 8-9 month old daughter and a 4 year old daughter. I'm just very

excited at how the children and parents are totally accepting of our son

.

The newly built house to the left of us is still available and there is one

behind us that is for sale. And lots of lots for building!

Now, about the school system. I personally would prefer to homeschool but

that's just not going to happen right now. (the neighbor a couple of houses

down homeschools her 3 kids and has given me lots of good advice and info.)

My 6 year old son is completely non-verbal, and pretty severe. It would be

like homeschooling someone who speaks a different language. I'm very heavy

into the biomedical side trying to get his body well, and when I looked into

the price of at-home therapies or private schools, I knew I had to contact

the local schools just to see what they had to offer. Diane Bitter, the

special education director for Collin County, came to see us. She said, if

we lived in Wylie, there is already a program in place, but if Community

doesn't have one, well, we'll just create one for him. She suggested that he

go to the ESY (Extended school year) program in Wylie. It was 3 days a week

for 3 hours a day, he went for 3 weeks. So they could just evaluate him. He

loved it. He would bring us his bookbag to let us know he wanted to go!

Yesterday was the official ARD (admission, review, and dismissal) there was

about 12 people there. His special ed teacher, the aide they hired

especially for him, other teachers from various grades, the principal, vice

principal, head of transportation, nurse, Diane, we all talked about what

would be the best way to approach things, how long his school day will be,

what evaluations they did when he was in the ESY summer program, how they

think his day should be structured, setting goals, discipline policy, (using

redirection, because he is not going to understand time-out or anything like

that) he is going to be in the special ed room all-day and may go to lunch

at the same time as other kids (with his aide of course) and maybe go to

computer lab with other kids (with his aide ) he will get speech 30 min 2

times a week and they are going to do an ot and pt eval to see if he needs

anything there. I mainly wanted to hear that he wasn't going to be in a

class of 30 kids, and that he is not to be left alone at all. Diane

suggested a maximum of 3 other kids in the room with him at one time (that's

what they had in summer) and that he is basically going to have 1 on 1 for

a vast majority of the school day anyway. Overall I was very impressed.I'm

probably going to put my daughter in Kindergarten there next year (she's not

going to be 5 until just after Sept 1. But a note to add that's the first I

ve ever heard of is that from 6th grade on they offer distance learning

through the school. So you can homeschool through the local school district.

Now I'll give you some websites to look at.

Collin county official site..... http://www.co.collin.tx.us/index.jsp

Community isd site..... http://www.community.isd.tenet.edu/

below is a county map of collin county isd's you can sort of figure out the

cities from this::

http://penick.tea.state.tx.us/SchoolDistrictLocator/counties/r10/collin.asp

www.goffhomes.com

9 miles down the road from where we live is Rockwall and 9 miles the other

way is Wylie. both are building up with shopping and restaurants. We rarely

have any need to go elsewhere but now that 544 is completed Plano is just 30

minutes or so, I go there for the BIG Whole Foods Market, and Dr. Rao's

office (our fantastic dr.!!!!) and there is a fabulous dentist at the

Monarch dental in Rockwall.)

Now that I read over this email.....we are pretty darn fortunate!!!!!!

Let me know if you'd like more!!!!!!!! I got plenty more!!!!!!!!!!

......laurie winn

aphase@...