By law, public schools must provide free and appropriate education to all children, including those with learning disabilities. Children with learning disabilities often have Individual Education Plans, or IEPs, that specify what accommodations they need due to their learning disabilities. IEPS also identify goals appropriate to the child's abilities. Accommodations might include allowing the student more time to take tests or complete assignments, providing a quiet area free of distractions for test taking, making shorter assignments, providing textbooks on tape, allowing tape recording of lectures, using oral instead of written tests, and providing individual instruction or tutoring as needed.
Children with learning disabilities severe enough to prevent them from learning and succeeding in regular classrooms might benefit from education in special classrooms or even in special schools within the public school system. Some public schools districts provide special schools for children with learning disabilities. Others educate learning disabled students in regular schools but in separate classrooms with specially trained teachers. Children must have IEPs in order to receive special services. Some children with learning disabilities spend part of their school days in regular classrooms and part of their days in special classrooms, giving them the opportunity to be educated alongside their peers while still receiving the special help they need.
Some parents decide to send children with learning disabilities to private schools. These often, though not always, offer smaller classes, which can benefit children with learning disabilities. Some private schools specialize in serving children with special needs, and some offer greater flexibility than most public schools. That is not the case with all private schools, however, and laws do not always require private schools to make the same kinds of accommodations for learning disabilities that public schools must make. In addition, some parents simply cannot afford to send their children to private schools.
Some parents decide that no schools are suitable for their children with learning disabilities and choose to home school their children instead. Home schooling is legal in all 50 states although regulations vary. If you might want to home school your child, check with the state board of education to learn the requirements where you live.