Thanks MTPockets!
Posted By: (sm) on 2009-03-12
In Reply to: My heart really goes out to you... - MTPockets
I appreciate your kind words and offer of a shoulder to lean on. It can be really rough dealing with the school system. Yes, we are in the South, and I have heard before that the schools up North are so much better.
Your son sounds like a fine young man, and I am sure you are very proud of him. Way to go! In my son's case, they originally diagnosed moderate to severe autism, so we have come a long way with them now saying Asperger's. He scores in the high average and above on all of the cognitive testing, but when he was transitioning to middle school they placed him in a school that was not our home school, after having been told for a year and a half that he would be going to the home school, and he was devastated. They said that the program they were recommending was not available at our home school (which we knew all along, but his teacher was telling us the whole time that they were working on getting that program and talking to her about teaching there . . . we were later told by the middle school administrator that it was never in the works at all). Anyway, they said that the program they had would be the next step for him, which we never understood because the one they put him in was all general education classes, with only a homeroom teacher who specialized in autism. The program at the home school is called collaborative, where most of the kids are general education, with a certain allowed number of SWDs (students with disabilities) allowed, and they have both a general education teacher and a special ed teacher in each class. We had several meetings to try to get them to go ahead and place him in the program at our home school, and in the end, the day before school started, they said, "Let's try this program for the first nine weeks, and if he does well then we can move him to the other program." He had to ride the special ed bus, and began misbehaving terribly as soon as school began. They then agreed to move him to the home school, but into the EBD classroom, and so we have now basically lost two school years trying to get him to work his way out of there into the program he should've been placed in to begin with. We finally got an admission, in our recent IEP meeting, that this is not the appropriate class for him, and the teacher basically wanted us to go back to start -- saying he wanted to recommend the school where my son started sixth grade. I was not willing to live through groundhog day, and said that we should try collaborative. Luckily the school psychologist backed me, because the teacher still, even after admitting that EBD was not the appropriate placement, wanted to have my son work up to level 3 (instead of 4) and stated that he could not have the other kids see my son get out of there without working up the level. I said that if that was the reason, then we were no longer talking about an Individual Education Plan, and that when my son has told me this and that about so and so getting out of that class and only being on level 2, I have told him that it is not our business what happens with so and so, and that we need to concentrate on our own situation and how we're going to work out of that class, and that is what I thought about the other students. It's not their business. He was visibly not happy with my statements, but I had him on that and he knew it, so my son began those classes this week! (Although even after this was decided in the meeting, the teacher still went into the class after the meeting and told my son he would have to work to level 3, which we initially went along with, but he started putting him through the wringer again and I said it's time to move him.) It's still going to be a struggle because he's behind the others now (always an A/B student until all of this, and has nothing less than a C now, but we are going to have to work to catch him up, especially in Math, which he has always been good at in the past).
Sorry, I know this has turned into a long story, and I really just wanted to say thanks!
Complete Discussion Below:  marks the location of current message within thread
The messages you are viewing
are archived/old.
To view latest messages and participate in discussions, select
the boards given in left menu
Other related messages found in our database
|
