Well, the proverbial #@!* hit the fan this weekend chez DD. Dave went to Joseph's teacher conference Thursday, Friday the teacher finally sent a copy of a report written a team of four Speech Language Pathologists (SLPs), one of whom has worked with J for past 1.5 years (and I thought had a clue of who and where he was) home. This report is the tipping point for me. I've been dissatisfied with the school for the past two years--we never signed Joseph's IEP this year, hoping to inspire the system to do the right thing. Well, it is clear that no one is going to do anything to educate Joseph... At this point my plan is:
1) Keep Joseph home for a few weeks, doing ABA all day everyday and going with his ABA tutor to "home school" activities so he doesn't lose all touch with other kids...
2) Think about the next step--Do we want to officially pull him out of school and homeschool for the rest of the year? Do we want to sue the district to provide appropriate services? Do we move? Will another district do what we need without a law suit. Figure out if we have enough ABA hours, or can get enough ABA hours to cover full time ABA. If we can't get the hours, figure out how much it will cost...
3) Dave's job will be to talk with the head of special ed in other districts. My job will be to talk with a realtor.
4) I'm also going to record Joseph working with his ABA tutors at home. I don't think anyone in the school system really understands how fast J signs. I need video proof. I figured out how to record short video clips with my digital camera and play them back on my computer this morning (for a 50 year old, this was an achievement!!!) I hope I can burn them to CD/DVD to let other people see them. Or email files that others can watch... More experimenting in my future...
5) I know signing scripted sentences, reading books, etc. etc. isn't "real" language. But it is the building blocks. He has a way more sophisticated set of building blocks in his hands then PECs will ever give him. I need educators who want to work with the building blocks he has to help him develop as much real language as he can. I don't know his potential... but I know he sure as hell has not been learning a @#$! thing in school. Okay--I've started to rant. There has been quite a bit of that over the last 48 hours.
Keep in touch. Say prayers for us. Come visit in August when we will be packing and moving! I don't expect to find a perfect school or school district or teacher--but I have to find better than what we have. We are looking at privates, charters, publics, etc. etc. Everything is on the table. This is all very hard for Dave. He invested 8 years in this school system as a board of education member (most of you know that). He doesn't expect special treatment, but he is frustrated that his district--the urban district he believes in so passionately--shows such incompetence when it comes to his kid...
2 comments:
I can loan you our video camera if you want to record Joseph's signing.
I hate when this happens. We ran through some issues last year...luckily, we were able to transfer schools. The school we were at was 'supposed' to be good at dealing with special needs kids, but it was not the case. We transferred back to Demetrius' 'home' school, which wasn't as 'equipped', but to date, much more enaged in helping him mainstream and achieve.
All it takes is one or two to change the whole dynamic. And in our case - being in the suburbs is all the difference. It might not be what you want to hear, but I wouldn't be telling like it is...
Good luck and you are in our thoughts.
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