IEPs for U and ME

Is it spring again already?! Man.  Either someone’s speeding up the clock or I’m getting old WAY too fast…

We got the call for Little Miss’s Individual Education Program (IEP) meeting, and had that meeting this past week. No big surprises academically, as we have slowly seen that her fourth-grade work is falling farther and farther behind because of the wiring of her brain.

Actually the school psychologist we’ve been working with for six years (who knows Little Miss very well) came up with a very apt description of how that brain works:  when Little Miss is asked a question, the results are like a Google search. She comes up with everything she knows about that subject, all facts of equal weight, and she has to tell you all of them, and may actually get to the one that answers your question–with the level of language that she has, which is at a very practical, concrete second grade level. Not much there for analysis or conceptualizing yet. (Working on that.)

But the team brainstormed nicely, and we set up some possibilities for pre-teaching information, since her long term memory seems better than the short-term. We talked about doing extra work on the computer, especially in science, looking up images and reinforcing information visually.

The most ironic part–and we had to laugh, or else we would have had to hurt someone– was that the teacher sent as a representative of the fifth grade staff had also taught the Captain. We tried to point out that Little Miss and the Captain are very different in just about every way.

Two years ago, we wanted the Captain to do sixth grade in his home school instead of at the school with the autistic support program, hoping it would urge him to curb some of his odd behaviors before transitioning to junior high.  We had a meeting with the home school (which had originally asked the Captain to be removed TO the autistic support school mid-first grade), explaining that we thought it would be a good idea to let him experience the “general population,” if you would, in a smaller environment.

This particular fifth-grade teacher had come to that meeting with a written agenda and scared HELL out of the home school, talking about how hard the boy was to control and his outbursts and his meltdowns and on and on and on…. we were denied.

But at Little Miss’s IEP meeting, she smiled and reminisced about how much she’d liked the Captain, asked how he was doing, and said, “Oh, I’ll never forget him.”

After she left, I turned to the psychologist and said “Did we all go to the same  meeting?”  She kind of made a face and shook her head and we both laughed. In that poking a stick in your eye way.  Maybe the kids aren’t the only ones with issues.

Can’t WAIT till next year.