Yeah, so we had Monkey’s annual IEP update meeting yesterday and the most exciting part of the whole meeting was…Monkey lost his 4th tooth mid-meeting!
The rest of the topics were pretty unexciting. We talked about what sort of evaluations the school would be requesting for the 3 year re-eval and we were fine with all they suggested. We were happy to learn that his current providers will be doing the evaluations. It will make everything much easier on Monkey and I know they’ll get the best possible results out of him. I did suggest that if they do cognitive testing that they use the K-ABC test which I’ve seen recommended for kids with FX in the past but the psychologist expressed a preference for using just the Vineland. That is fine with us because parent and teacher report IS going to show his skill level much more accurately than any standardized testing will.
The team set goals for the rest of this year, everyone is excited about his progress. We’re pushing forward on new goals with only one exception…alphabet and number recognition. He is about 80% on identifying the letters at school (he’s probably 99% at home, just Q and Z sometimes give him a hard time) but the teacher wants this to be a solid 100% skill before moving on. Works for me. He is much less interested in numbers and he is basically guessing. If the card has a two digit number on it he will start at 10 and work his way up until he gets it right, lol. Definitely an area he needs to work on.
We had 4 things on the agenda we put together with our advocate and 3 of them were already addressed in the new goals. 1 was something the OT wanted to discuss with us. She wanted to change one of her OT sessions to a push-in delivery. Currently, he has 2 sessions a week and both are pull-outs. We wanted to request that they try to do more push-in services for him to keep him with his peers as much as possible. The OT was relieved, apparently a lot of parents prefer pull-out services and fight her on the issue. Not these parents, I keep telling them that this is the sort of thing that will play to his strengths!
The only semi-annoying thing at the meeting was the discussion of how many IEPs we need to write in the next 3 months! We did a re-write yesterday for his annual, we will do a re-write in June for his kindergarten placement beginning in September 2010 AND we need to do a re-write wrap-around IEP to bridge the annual IEP and the kindergarten one. Gah. So annoying. No one understands why but the order is coming from the SPED director and she is SO not a person you want to p*ss off, as many in our district have learned. Soooo, 3 IEPs in 3 months it is!
We had the same issue in our district for a while. MAJORLY annoying. Now it’s a series of ammendments and transition meetings and two IEPs.
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Do you have to actually write them yourselves, or you mean you have three meetings to deal with? For holly;s IFSP the case worker and therapist’s do all of the work and I just read the reports over and make suggestions. Also, at UC Davis as part of the baby Study Holly is in they use the vineland to assess her. What is the K-ABC and how is it different?
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Hmm, I’ll have to look into those tests before the next evals. Overall sounds like it was a pretty okay meeting. The less drama, the better. I’ve got the same question about who does the re-writes. I’m assuming they do, and then with every re-write, there’s another meeting???
I kinda like the push-in idea too. Never heard the term before. I might suggest that for ours.
Keep up the good work, and remember….summer’s acomin!
The re-writes are primarily done by the school portion of the team but we have to have a meeting to discuss their draft and revise. Sometimes our re-writes take multiple meetings depending on the issues and these will be full re-writes, not just revisions so I would guess 2-4 hours/meeting on average. Apparently the language of the kindergarten IEP will be totally different than the pre-k versions we’re used to and it will look drastically different.
Whereas the Vineland is a questionnaire completed by the parents, the K-ABC (Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children) is a standardized cognitive/IQ test that is administered to the child by a psychologist. Many schools will use other more well known tests.
My understanding of it, based on what I’ve read, is that the other cognitive/IQ tests tend to test sequential processing and kids with FX tend to test more accurately when they’re allowed to show simultaneous processing. Sequential processing is a weakness in Fragile X which is why the K-ABC is often used in FX research projects. Marcia Braden has written about it.
Personally, I would prefer they continue to use the Vineland rather than ever doing a cognitive/IQ test. I think IQ tests for our kids (at least the boys) are useless. There are some in our district who will really push for them so I wanted to be sure that if we had to do one we did the least awful one. Now that I know we can refuse to consent to IQ testing completely that’s probably the approach we’ll take! I love my advocate.
The push-in model is so good for Monkey. The therapists run small groups in the classroom with 2 or 3 typical peer models included to demonstrate the activity. It lets Monkey learn the activity by watching the therapist teach it to the other students…he finds this less overwhelming than direct instruction. It keeps him in the room so he doesn’t miss an activity, when he does a pull out he might miss the art time when he’s away with the therapist but if they do it as a push-in they make sure it’s at the same time all the other kids are doing table top activities as well. It eliminates the transitions out of the class, to the therapy room and back into class which Monkey does not enjoy. It’s also an effective way to provide therapy for more than one child in the class at the same time…which the district loves, lol. It’s really a win-win situation.
All in all, sounds pretty mellow except for the rewrites.We have push-ins and pullouts combined. The most annoying part of the pullouts is that they always forget to go over what was missed in class and sometimes don’t give the handouts that were missed. You’d think they’d have this under control but there are so many parents that help in the classroom that don’t know the drill. Congrats on the push-in.