Thank you for all the wonderful comments yesterday. Since you have been in my shoes one way or another (and even if you haven't, you might know others who have, so please feel free to chime in), I'd like to know if you've hired or found volunteer advocates to come into IEP meetings with you. My own educational consultant teaches a course on special education advocacy and has invited me to be a guest on her panel this weekend.
When I accepted her invitation she wrote, "I know your tendency to over prepare...." She knows me too well
So I thought I could confirm her suspicions and ask you the same two questions I'm going to be asked. I already have of my own ideas, but I'm interested in hearing yours too because I like the interaction from yesterday. (I won't use them if you ask me not to use them.)
1)What difference did use of an advocate have for your child (in the dynamic of the team, your understanding of the process, etc)?
2)How did the use of an advocate (in my case, attorney, neuropsych and our educational consultant) make a difference for your son?
Just briefly, my husband and I called in the hired guns the summer between preschool and kindergarten. Jonathan started off with an IEP through ChildFind, our state program for early intervention program under IDEA. We really wanted and needed pragmatic speech and social skills, but we received Occupational Therapy. Probably the only reason we even received the first IEP was a friend from our church was the OT assigned to his home school. She went out on maternity during his preschool year and the new OT bumped him down to observation and consult. We asked for Jonathan to be retested for speech and language. The vice principal said, "You don't want to do that." We insisted we did. The VP said, "I can assure you if you request testing, Jonathan will lose his IEP." We were naive and pushed. Sure enough, based upon all the new players at the IEP table, Jonathan was found to no longer meet the criterion for eligibility under the school's interpretation of IDEA.
We went to the local chapter of LDA. We actually sat down with the board, which had about 100 years of advocacy experience between all its members. The LDA board told us the school was correct in their interpretation of IDEA and Jonathan's evaluations. To give them credit, they also added the disclaimer that they only had ADHD advocacy experience and not autism. Someone from that meeting pulled me aside and recommended I speak to a special education attorney.
I could say, by happenstance, but I believe in the Lord's ability to work things out for my good and His glory, the attorney she recommended wouldn't return my calls. So I went to
Wrightslaw Yellow Pages and found another attorney. If you are familiar with
Wrighstlaw and their newsletter and training seminars, you might be familiar with our attorney. It turns out I'd been reading his articles on the webpage for about a month before we hired him. From there we were introduced to all the other experts we used the first three years.
I know in our case Jonathan "flies below the radar." He's smart enough and high functioning enough he can blend in easily with his peers. He can also "hold himself together" and "internalize" all his stress so he's not a behavior problem at school. But he's miserable and so are the rest of us when he gets home. The first year of kindergarten he had thirty-eight wetting accidents in a row during school hours. That fact alone, our neuro-psychologist said, indicated something was wrong in his environment. Our educational consultant introduced us to the idea of Jonathan being "twice exceptional." He has learning disabilities and he has gifted abilities. She said if we were in other states, he'd qualify for an IEP just for his giftedness. (Too bad those states don't have Naval Bases for my husband to work.)
As I learned more and more about Jonathan's disabilities and about advocacy, we stopped using our consultants as much. (That...and a little bit of humbling myself before the school administration smoothed the road during subsequent IEP meetings.) Now we pretty much only call our educational consultant with questions and to put her on notice of meetings, in the event things turn south.
Recommend
Post a Comment