The answer should be yes. Not "how can I get my loved one help?"

Category Archives: IEP

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.

Day 7 ~ A wake up and PWN from the school

Good morning friends… Well, actually it is afternoon, but I have been up and about for about 6 hours. Cheers to you on this glorious morning.

A couple of things to start our day.

Last night, David had an incredible meltdown, his first since being in the residential facility.  I admit, I did not handle it well.  I apologised to him for my response to his meltdown.  It happened, we are moving forward.

Today, we are working on school work since there is still no apparent movement by the school district to resolve our impasse about David returning to public school.  But, then a short while ago, I got a call from one of our care coordinators for David.  She received a hand written Prior Written Notice (PWN) from the school district.  I called up our advocate to see if she had received one as well.  Never in my life have I seen a handwritten PWN.  The PWN was addressed to my wife and I, and included our advocate, the director of the regional special education unit, our care coordinator, the superintendent, and the appropriate staff from the elementary school.

The PWN did not include any of the staff from the residential facility that my son was discharged from a week ago.  How can we have an IEP meeting without the previous teacher being involved when that teacher is affiliated with agency that our son was a resident of for over 6 months?

I have not yet received the PWN, but have been told about it from three different people already this morning.  I can’t see meeting with the school without our advocate, care coordinator, or the staff from the residential facility.

So that is all the news to report this morning…  Hope your day is filled with sunshine and happiness.

Today the kids want breakfast for supper, so making peanut butter chip pancakes for supper tonight. Really good with grape jelly.

IEP 1 of 3

Well, we have one IEP done for this year.  Things are going well for our middle son, despite the autism.  He is developing friendships with his peers, flirts with the girls, had an issue with electricity and gotten detention twice.

He is high functioning in reading, comprehension, processing, and reasoning.  He has issues with verbal communication. He reads at a level that they have a hard time measuring and comprehends at the same level. He is in the 7th grade. The teachers have issue with him just knowing the answer, they need him to write out how he comes to the answer, this is most prevalent in science and mathematics.  In ag class, he can identify every tool, every seed, and can tell out of 10 or 15 different tools, which one is missing and what they are all used for. Considering we don’t live on a farm this is quite a feat.

The teachers have issues with his personal hygiene.  Mostly that he doesn’t tie his shoes, and never tucks in his pockets. I explained that some things are just not on his radar of important things to worry about.  He wears slip on shoes now, so shoe laces are no longer an issue, but even when he had shoe laces, he never tripped over his laces.  The science teacher is concerned about when they get into human anatomy and reproduction, and how our son will react.  I asked how any other 7th grade boy reacts.  So we will wait and see. In time, they will need to do some dissection, hopefully our son will handle it well.

Moving forward we talked about him joining some brain athletic teams, and the golf team. Overall, things are looking very positive for our son.  He has a memory and level of understanding of the topics that are presented to him that they are not able to always quantify.

Now we have two IEP’s left.  Our oldest boy and our youngest.  Both of which promise to be a struggle with the school. Oh, and the detention happened because our son the linguist dropped the f-bomb three times when walking into a classroom.