Special Education in Millis/Holliston or Westborough/Shrewsbury? (Weston, Dover: home, school districts)

[JaHeLo]

We have a three year old just diagnosed with ASD. He is high functioning, so my hope is he will able to be in regular classrooms. We are looking at these towns and I was wondering if anyone has any experience with the special education at these districts? We are priced out of the "top" school districts.

Millis (Nice town, but heard it's too small of a district to provide more extensive services)
Holliston (heard only positive things)

In general, are large or small districts better for SPED? We are also looking at Westborough or Shrewsbury. I know Westborough is probably the "best" school district here, but it is a lot larger, so I wonder if that's a negative or a positive.

Any suggestions or experiences would be greatly appreciated. I am very new to this. I didn't see anything on here about SPED re: these towns.

[MikePRU]

I don't have any personal experience with the SPED programs in those towns. However, I do have a SPED kiddo at home and I do talk to a lot of other SPED parents.

Generally speaking, what I've found is that towns that are sparsely populated (ex. Millis, Dover, Sherborn, Weston, etc.) tend not to have a well developed SPED program because the population of kids in town that need such services is often small. So, it just doesn't make sense financially for the town to put a highly developed program in place.

Conversely, towns that have higher population levels and well funded schools tend to have more flushed out SPED programs in place.

I wish I could be more helpful but I'm just not at all familiar with the programs in these towns. I hope these general rules of thumb that I've put together from anecdotal information shared with me are at least a little helpful.