IEP

Well, nine hours since Rosie's IEP meeting at her old school, and her dad and I are still practically twitching with irritation. No doubt I'll be doing it every time I read the assessment report. That official language is pretty loaded: disability, maladaptive, impairment, at-risk, deficits. It's definitely not couched in terms of objective language - a child's strengths and weaknesses. An IEP meeting is where the results of the school assessment are presented and discussed and an individualized educational plan offered, which lists accomodations for disability and specific therapies the school district will offer.

One point of strain has been in recognizing some of the inconsistent behavior of the school team. They were pushing their agenda fairly hard, which is that they disapprove of our taking Rose out of a mainstreamed classroom. For the school psychologist, the main issue seems to be that he thinks that keeping her in school is what provides her with opportunities to practice social interaction and allows her access to social skills therapy. This from the guy who told her to try harder to make friends, resulting in her going out and attempting to play with kids who roundly rejected her. I'd like to know how he thinks keeping her in a pressure-cooker situation socially is going to help her. Everyone who is open to admitting it knows how vicious a passel of kids is, particularly on the playground. She's marked out as different already. How is forcing her into this on a daily basis going to help her cope with both learning how to socialize and how to deal with rejection and other situations? For that matter, how is the schooling model used over the last hundred years or so at all normal or positive? Oh, that's something for another rant.

Another inconsistency that has me grinding my teeth is that they kept dangling this offer of both group social skills therapy and individual help at making friends, using the buddy system - if we'd keep her in regular school. This was first brought up in mid September. They didn't do a damn thing to help her all the way through the end of December. If they could see perfectly well that she was unhappy and struggling and that she needed a buddy, why didn't they help her? That doesn't require a diagnosis or permission for therapy of any kind - which they also had by the beginning of November. Their intern told me they wouldn't have group social skills therapy because there weren't other kids who needed it. The team - psychologist, teacher, principal, speech therapist - saw that she was struggling to make friends and didn't do anything to help her, though they outlined from the beginning what they ought to do.

We were so grateful for the representative from the home school agency who came to explain the homeschool program to the team, and brought the report from Rosie's supervising teacher that she was thriving and that she thought Rosie would finish all her second grade work early. It countered wonderfully her classroom teacher's emphatic, bristling, angry comments about how Rosie couldn't finish work, melted down or refused to do work with a time limit, was defiant, and had produced very little work from the beginning of the term to the time when we took her out. If we have another IEP - say, at the county level, or if she ever returns to the regular classroom - I really want to have a psychologist who specializes in autism and an advocate present.

I think I'll be snorting steam from both nostrils over this for a while yet, even considering that I have nothing to sustain that anger at this point. The attitude that Rosie was a nail sticking up that must be hammered down is just infuriating. No true sense of accepting or accommodating differing abilities or cognition.

The home school representative asked us on the side why we went ahead with the IEP at all, since we had already decided to pull her out of the classroom. Three reasons, really: firstly, her pediatrician, who's a specialist in developmental disorders, is relying in part on the assessment to help him get a baseline, and I want to see if any therapies are available to us through the agencies he's a part of; second, getting this broad assessment helps us understand where her difficulties are so that we can help her better; and third, if she does ever return to a regular classroom, I want to be sure that she does get accomodations that she needs in that environment.