Heh. I’m so sick of this. I cried at Duhdee the other day “And he’s only FOUR!” I cannot believe we have…uhhh…too many more years of this ahead of us.
Anyway, I spoke to our advocate and she advised me to call (and e-mail) his team chair. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before! She was not present at the last meeting and I think that’s the fastest way to cut through the BS. So, I called her and told her that the meeting got off track, that we had agreed to update his goals and add a summer program to his IEP, then reconvene in Sept. to discuss the rest. I also told her we still haven’t seen an IEP that meets these two (and only these two) requirements. I told her that I don’t want to sign it until we go back to his February IEP with ONLY these two changes. I also told her that I don’t want to reject in part, which is our other option if they can’t give us what we had agreed to sign, because we don’t want the Department of Education getting involved (which they would automatically have to do if we reject.) So, that’s where we are at.
If his team leader can get us the report we want quickly enough we’ll sign it. If she can’t, I have a list of issues so I can reject it in part and we’ll have to let the DOE get involved which I don’t think any of us want at this point. There’s no reason we can’t handle this ourselves without mediation. Either way, we’ll be signing something and returning it to them so that he can go to the summer program. It’s up to them to decide which route we take.
Our advocate also is now up to speed on what went wrong last week, what we have coming in for reports/information from the Fragile X clinic and I think she understands how far apart we are right now on placement. I’m glad we have the summer to plan for this, I need a little time to recover from the stress of last week!
***CUE THE ANGELS**** We have an IEP we can sign! WOOT! WOOT!
Yeah you have an IEP. I would tell you that it’s get better but I know you are smarter than that 😆 I can say that some things do get easier because of experience and the word gets out that you won’t take it.
We made it through ONE meeting on our own last year then we called an advocate. We made it through ONE meeting on our own this year then we called our advocate back.
The whole tone of the meetings changes as soon as we mention an advocate (things get so much cleaner and efficient, lol) so I think I’ll just take this lesson to heart and take her along for the rest of our school career, lol. She definitely won’t take it 🙂
Way to go! Monkey is so fortunate to have such proactive parents 🙂