starcloaked
New Member
I'm going to try to write this post, but I'm not sure I know where to begin. I have another window open where I need to write the "letter to a stranger" that lays everything out rationally and dispassionately, but I'm not there yet. I apologize, this is long.
My son has an IEP after a long evaluation process last year that got him into the public preschool. He had been kicked out of two private preschools, but in a Special Education preschool classroom, he did fantastically well. In five months, he never had a meltdown. The teacher said she had to speak to him in the hall once. Over the summer, he did okay at nature day camp, though he started to have trouble toward the end of his four weeks there. But it proved that he could do an all-day (6 hour) program with the same schedule as kindergarten.
Strangely, all summer, we didn't get the IEP in the mail. We got another document, and when we called the SPED department they said they were expecting it and it should be in soon, and then oops, everyone was gone for the summer. We were having a private neurospcyh evaluation, so we figured we would do a new one before the start of school anyway. We figured his paperwork was at the new school.
I know, you veterans here are shaking your heads at my fatal error.
I send the neurospych evaluation in August, talk to the ETL (SPED gatekeeper) through phone tag voice mails and a formal letter requesting a revision to the IEP. She says she's putting it in process. I call just after labor day. She calls me back. She can't seem to find the IEP. In fact, the school has never seen the IEP. None of the services agreed upon at the team meeting in June have been put in place, the placement has not been made with his IEP in mind, and the school has NO PLAN for him.
So I go into advocacy mode, I start giving people deadlines, I cancel my work day to accompany my spouse to the kindergarten visiting day and I give a run-down of the IEP meeting to the teacher, the Special Education teacher, and I meet with the principal who promises me that she will provide an aide in the classroom, assigned to difficult child, until the IEP meeting is held next week.
All this time, the city's director of Special Education is supposedly driving around town to the old school and to the new school figuring out who has the notes for the IEP and getting it written. He says it's in the mail on Friday. It's now Tuesday and it has not been received by me or by the old school. It's not that big of a city--we have three zip codes.
The first day of school goes well for my difficult child. Another kid in my difficult child's class has an incident with a friend of my difficult child's, in which my difficult child's friend gets somewhat seriously injured (stitches on her face). This kind of thing tends to scare my difficult child, though he won't talk about it. He had a horrible afternoon AFTER school, including having to be carried out of the Y.
The second day of school, my difficult child is the out-of-control one. He gets unruly in gym class. He spits at lunch. He throws a block at the teacher, hitting her in the face and raising a bruise. Then the principal comes in, she sees difficult child grabbing another kid's arm, she intervenes (presumably in a scary way) and difficult child freaks out, tries to bite her, hit her, pinch her, spit at her, "say horrible things"...etc. etc. Turns out difficult child dropped a book, the girl screamed at him, and then he, as he is wont to do, freaked the heck out.
So now he's been asked to stay out of school for the rest of the week, an emergency IEP meeting has been called by the SPED director, and they're talking about moving him to a different school in the district that has some sort of a partial inclusion program, unlike the one he's in. I would have been fine with that had it been recommended earlier, so that we could have planned for it and school-choiced his twin sister into the same school, but now we've got a terrible start when the major decision at the June IEP meeting was that getting off to a good start was the most important thing for him (and therefore a bunch of frontloaded services were in place). And I've had my kids in two different schools for the past year, and I'm not up for that again. I feel like this happened because THEY screwed up, and then when they were supposed to make it right, they failed to do so (why wasn't there an aide there when the principal walked in?)
The code of conduct document for the school says that kids can be suspended or expelled for threats or assault, so although it's clearly due to their failure to provide services (though since there was no new signed IEP, and the IEP they had said "integrated preschool" as the service to be provided, is that even legally defensible?). So I guess we're going with the suspension. But it makes me completely irate.
So I have this meeting on FRIDAY, and half the team that was going to be assembled for the already-scheduled meeting to consider the new evaluation can't be there, and I've called a lawyer and got the name of an educational advocate. But I am not sure how to do this, and it feels like every move we make gets us into worse trouble.
We went for nearly a year with minimal child care. My spouse is working half-time, but got lots of flex from the boss last year, and now was supposed to be time to get back on track (we're thinking maybe FLMA, but don't know how we'll make ends meet). My job is out of control busy. We had really high hopes that he'd finally be in a full-day program that would work for him, since he did so brilliantly well in the preschool. I'm so discouraged, and I feel like we're reliving last fall, when we suddenly got kicked out of preschool and were left with a badly-shaken little boy, a distressed twin sister, and no child care. I know I'll come back and be ready to fight another day, but right now this feels a lot more like beirut than holland .
How do people do it? I feel like between the incredibly difficult job of parenting my son and the task of earning a living, I don't know how to learn the law well enough to maneuver around these people. I haven't been perfect, but I've called, I've put things in writing, I've followed up, I've informed and supported and reminded and asked for clear commitments. I advocated and clarified and reminded and targeted my requests. Yet here we are. Is it alway like this? I thought it would get better now that he's in school. This is not what I had in mind.
Thanks, if you got all the way through this. I lurk here a lot, have posted only a tiny bit, but thanks for being here. It helps to know we're not alone.
Star
My son has an IEP after a long evaluation process last year that got him into the public preschool. He had been kicked out of two private preschools, but in a Special Education preschool classroom, he did fantastically well. In five months, he never had a meltdown. The teacher said she had to speak to him in the hall once. Over the summer, he did okay at nature day camp, though he started to have trouble toward the end of his four weeks there. But it proved that he could do an all-day (6 hour) program with the same schedule as kindergarten.
Strangely, all summer, we didn't get the IEP in the mail. We got another document, and when we called the SPED department they said they were expecting it and it should be in soon, and then oops, everyone was gone for the summer. We were having a private neurospcyh evaluation, so we figured we would do a new one before the start of school anyway. We figured his paperwork was at the new school.
I know, you veterans here are shaking your heads at my fatal error.
I send the neurospych evaluation in August, talk to the ETL (SPED gatekeeper) through phone tag voice mails and a formal letter requesting a revision to the IEP. She says she's putting it in process. I call just after labor day. She calls me back. She can't seem to find the IEP. In fact, the school has never seen the IEP. None of the services agreed upon at the team meeting in June have been put in place, the placement has not been made with his IEP in mind, and the school has NO PLAN for him.
So I go into advocacy mode, I start giving people deadlines, I cancel my work day to accompany my spouse to the kindergarten visiting day and I give a run-down of the IEP meeting to the teacher, the Special Education teacher, and I meet with the principal who promises me that she will provide an aide in the classroom, assigned to difficult child, until the IEP meeting is held next week.
All this time, the city's director of Special Education is supposedly driving around town to the old school and to the new school figuring out who has the notes for the IEP and getting it written. He says it's in the mail on Friday. It's now Tuesday and it has not been received by me or by the old school. It's not that big of a city--we have three zip codes.
The first day of school goes well for my difficult child. Another kid in my difficult child's class has an incident with a friend of my difficult child's, in which my difficult child's friend gets somewhat seriously injured (stitches on her face). This kind of thing tends to scare my difficult child, though he won't talk about it. He had a horrible afternoon AFTER school, including having to be carried out of the Y.
The second day of school, my difficult child is the out-of-control one. He gets unruly in gym class. He spits at lunch. He throws a block at the teacher, hitting her in the face and raising a bruise. Then the principal comes in, she sees difficult child grabbing another kid's arm, she intervenes (presumably in a scary way) and difficult child freaks out, tries to bite her, hit her, pinch her, spit at her, "say horrible things"...etc. etc. Turns out difficult child dropped a book, the girl screamed at him, and then he, as he is wont to do, freaked the heck out.
So now he's been asked to stay out of school for the rest of the week, an emergency IEP meeting has been called by the SPED director, and they're talking about moving him to a different school in the district that has some sort of a partial inclusion program, unlike the one he's in. I would have been fine with that had it been recommended earlier, so that we could have planned for it and school-choiced his twin sister into the same school, but now we've got a terrible start when the major decision at the June IEP meeting was that getting off to a good start was the most important thing for him (and therefore a bunch of frontloaded services were in place). And I've had my kids in two different schools for the past year, and I'm not up for that again. I feel like this happened because THEY screwed up, and then when they were supposed to make it right, they failed to do so (why wasn't there an aide there when the principal walked in?)
The code of conduct document for the school says that kids can be suspended or expelled for threats or assault, so although it's clearly due to their failure to provide services (though since there was no new signed IEP, and the IEP they had said "integrated preschool" as the service to be provided, is that even legally defensible?). So I guess we're going with the suspension. But it makes me completely irate.
So I have this meeting on FRIDAY, and half the team that was going to be assembled for the already-scheduled meeting to consider the new evaluation can't be there, and I've called a lawyer and got the name of an educational advocate. But I am not sure how to do this, and it feels like every move we make gets us into worse trouble.
We went for nearly a year with minimal child care. My spouse is working half-time, but got lots of flex from the boss last year, and now was supposed to be time to get back on track (we're thinking maybe FLMA, but don't know how we'll make ends meet). My job is out of control busy. We had really high hopes that he'd finally be in a full-day program that would work for him, since he did so brilliantly well in the preschool. I'm so discouraged, and I feel like we're reliving last fall, when we suddenly got kicked out of preschool and were left with a badly-shaken little boy, a distressed twin sister, and no child care. I know I'll come back and be ready to fight another day, but right now this feels a lot more like beirut than holland .
How do people do it? I feel like between the incredibly difficult job of parenting my son and the task of earning a living, I don't know how to learn the law well enough to maneuver around these people. I haven't been perfect, but I've called, I've put things in writing, I've followed up, I've informed and supported and reminded and asked for clear commitments. I advocated and clarified and reminded and targeted my requests. Yet here we are. Is it alway like this? I thought it would get better now that he's in school. This is not what I had in mind.
Thanks, if you got all the way through this. I lurk here a lot, have posted only a tiny bit, but thanks for being here. It helps to know we're not alone.
Star
