Author Archives: carl

Day 8 ~ Facilitated what? and new friends !Success!

Since coming online with the new blog and website on January 3rd, I have made an incredible number of new friends.  Some really fantastic people are connecting with me.  How lucky am I?

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Back to the topic for the night.  Have you ever experienced a Facilitated IEP? According to the website http://www.directionservice.org, a facilitated IEP is:

“A facilitated IEP meeting is an IEP meeting that includes an impartial facilitator who promotes effective communication and who assists the IEP team in developing an acceptable IEP. The facilitator keeps the team focused on the proper development of the IEP while addressing conflicts that arise. IEP Facilitation is not used to resolve disputes unrelated to the IEP.”

In the state of North Dakota, the facilitator is paid by the state, which in turn enforces the impartiality of the facilitator because they can’t be influenced by either the school district or the parent.  This makes sense to me.

So tomorrow I will make application for a facilitated IEP.  Hopefully that will get my our back into the public school.

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On another note, We had a fairly good day today.  Ah heck, let me rephrase that, everything considered, today was FANTASTIC!!!  We had some minor incidents that had to be mediated between the youngest two boys, but hey, ya know what?  give you a little hint… sometimes brothers argue and fight… I should know, my brother and I fought like cats and dogs.   We are both still alive and value our relationship.  So I consider this largely normal behavior.

What we didn’t have today.  We didn’t have any melt downs.  We had some pouting, but pouting isn’t the end of the world.  When something necessitated the need for a time out, the time out was handled without complaint.  Overall, this day was a huge success!

Tomorrow looks to be shaping up to be a good day as well.  Why? or how can I know that?  Easy! Everyday is a good day!  If you wake up each day, isn’t that a good day?  If nothing else happened, at least you woke up. 🙂  Cheers. Carl @whynotfathers

Day 8 ~ snot today I tell you, don’t suck it in, blow!

I would call it a night cap, but I don’t drink, so we will call it a recap. 🙂

Last night, I had to go through some of our youngest son’s stuff. I found 5 9-volt batteries, the lids of two cat food cans, 8 pens, 2 nail clippers, 1 bag of cough drops, 1 box of granola bars and a screw driver from my computer tech kit.  So we are back to hoarding things again.  Not sure why he feels it is necessary to do this.  But, he does have OCD so maybe that is the only explanation available.

This morning, we heard only one thing from the school principal after our response yesterday to the PWN.  And that was a response that indicated that she was out of the office until Friday morning.  It wasn’t an out of office responder from Outlook or anything like that.  I know what those look like, and this was definitely not that.  But it also makes no attempt to schedule anything for the coming week.  Maybe she is just going to wait until Friday and try again. I don’t know.

On another note, the school counselor is a family friend who is deeply religious.  A trait we find endearing.  He is being lambasted by the administrators for not participating in meetings and activities at the elementary school that he has effectively been thrown out of.  He is never told about these events in advance, and since he doesn’t maintain time at the elementary school except for Fridays, he is not attuned to what is going on in that building.  Yet, he is constantly being lambasted for not attending events in the elementary school.

Now, I understand the concept of two sides to every story.  But, given the way we know the school treats parents, isn’t it reasonable to assume the possibility that they treat their employees almost as bad or just as bad?

Ok. Enough about the school. 🙂 For right now anyway, I promise.

David, our youngest is still fighting his cold. He was up frequently during the night coughing.  Hard to convince him that if he wants to get better, he needs to spit out whatever he coughs up rather than just swallowing it.  Same with the nose, if you sneeze, don’t suck it back in… get a kleenex and blow it the rest of the way out.  I know, it’s gross, but how do I convince a 10 year old oppositional defiant child with OCD, ADHD and autism that it is better for him to get it out than keep it in?  He is absolutely miserable when he is sick.

Today has been a fairly good day so far, yet it is only noon.  Here is a cheer for continued positive behavior  on his part, and continued positive support on my side.

Now it is time to put a turkey in the oven. Hope your day rocks!

don’t feel stupid yet? they think we are…

When my wife came home from work and checked her personal email, she discovered a copy of the prior written notice had been emailed to her.  And evidently it had been emailed to me as well.  To an account that I never use to communicate with the district.  Very frustrating.

As to the content of the PWN… well, let’s just say that it is adversarial in nature. We are trying to figure out what the principal is attempting to do.  First, the PWN isn’t from the Special Education teacher that our son would work with.  It is from the school principal.  Second, no contact was made with either my wife nor I regarding a date or time for the meeting.  No effort was made to contact our advocate or any of the other staff from outside the district who works with our son.

I did learn that the principal is out of the building for the next three days.  Rather convenient, as the meeting is scheduled for Friday morning.  Our advocate can’t make it to a Friday meeting, and if the principal had taken the basic step of contacting any of the participants prior to sending out the notice, she would know that the date and time she set wouldn’t work.  My wife and I need to be in the city that day for another of our kids who was born with a cleft palette and has his annual check up that day.

So we responded.

We wrote about how it is customary to contact people by phone to work out appropriate dates for an IEP meeting.  This has occurred with almost every IEP my wife and I have attended for the past 8 years.  Rarely does a meeting get scheduled without a phone call first checking for availability on a given date.  Never, and I mean never have we seen a hand written prior written notice.

I am a stay at home father, they have contact information for home, cell, and email for both my wife and I.  Plus they know and have the telephone number for the school district where my wife works.  How do I know?  Last year not one day went by when they didn’t call me for something.  They have called my wife at work so that she can participate in conference calls.  They have called both of us on days when they couldn’t work with our son and his disabilities so that we could come and get him.

The only reasonable explanation I can come up with for the manner of delivery of the notice is that principal thinks that if she isn’t in, we will think we can’t cancel.  Two of the agencies listed as participants in the IEP received the notice via fax.  Do you know how hard it is to read hand-written documents that have been through a fax machine?  Especially when the writing is interspersed with a form that is meant to be completed on a computer?

So we responded.

We wrote about how it is unprofessional for her to do this.  We wrote about how we felt that our son wasn’t being granted the opportunity to a FAPE (Free and Appropriate Public Education).  We wrote about how our son has done everything that they have asked of him for the past year, and deserved the opportunity to go to public school.

So now we are waiting. Again.  I am almost done writing our complaint to the Department of Public Instruction.

It goes to my editors and then back to me for corrections before I submit it.  I want to make sure that I am sticking to the facts, and legal precedence necessary and not being more emotional than necessary.

I am just floored at the audacity that members of our district are showing.  We asked for one other person to be included in the IEP meeting.  That is our school counselor, who the principal has a strong dislike for.  To the point where she has forced him out of the elementary school for all but one day a week.

So we responded.  That they need to include the residential facility that our son was discharged from last week.

We will continue to fight the good fight for our children, and others in the district who are entitled to an education and being forced out by this principal.

And as much as they try, they aren’t making us feel stupid.  They sure are trying though.  Why do I say that?  My wife is a special education teacher in another district and knows the law better than the school administrators do.  (which they absolutely hate)

 

More tomorrow.