This is a guest post by David Johnson, Vice President of Marketing and Communication for Crotched Mountain Foundation — the New Hampshire nonprofit organization that serves children, students, and adults with disabilities.
Crotched Mountain School is a unique place. In fact, I would hazard to say it ranks right up there in the catalog of All-Time Unique Places on the Face of the Earth. Top 10 at least. Maybe Top 12 if we’re counting Utica, New York.
Founded in 1953 as a rehabilitation center for young children with polio (the vaccine was discovered barely two years later), Crotched Mountain has evolved over the years, adapting its services and leveraging its remarkable mountain-based campus to serve the time’s most vulnerable population. Today, Crotched Mountain School provides day and residential special education to students ages 6 to 21 with disabilities, nearly half of whom have an autism diagnosis.
And though the student populations may change, there is an evergreen need in residential special education: communication. In fact, consistent, informative, and, yes, typical, communication is even more valuable to the parents who entrust Crotched Mountain School with the daily livelihood of their most precious possessions — their children.
And though a child coming to Crotched Mountain School arrives on our campus for good reason it in no way lessens the emotional wallop parting ways with a child for a residential placement can have on families. We’ve heard this directly from parents. It ain’t easy.
So anytime we as a school can manufacture a steady pipeline of information and keep child and parent tethered—even if it’s over electrons passing from computer monitor to monitor—we’re achieving something really, really cool. We’re achieving normalcy. An experience that is typical among atypical circumstances.
ParentSquare has given us the ability to welcome our parents into a supportive, active ecosystem. We post like crazy. Our content may not win any Literary Guild Awards anytime soon and, in fact, could be considered mundane and rudimentary, but I’m telling you, sometimes mundane and rudimentary is all you’re looking for if your parenting life to this point has been the opposite of that.
Halloween Dances. Picture day. The monthly dining hall menus. Dates for parent/teacher conferences. Pictures from the Science Fair. Photos of the most recent projects from art class. The latest about the chickens’ egg production in our agricultural program. A video from the Crotched Mountain School Prom (if you haven’t been to a Crotched Mountain School Prom, you, dear friend, have not lived). And, yes, regular updates from the classroom teachers.
These tidbits are savored by our families. Because they’re just like any other piece of communication from any other school to any other parent about any other kid. ParentSquare has opened the door to this new horizon.
And with that I need to excuse myself. We had a magician come visit our students a week ago and I got some great photos of wide-eyed students. I have to share the magic with our families.
