What’s chapped me is that they don’t do this here automatically. We had to really be firm about it (‘firm’ seems to be the word we all come back to), but we have a results meeting at the end of this week. We’ll have about 10 days to consider them and offer anything we think is needed to balance those out before the IEP meeting.

Here’s a tip for anyone reading this who works in this process for a school system: if the information we know we have a right to get does not equal what you give us voluntarily such that I have to spend hours trying to get what I should have gotten in the first place, is it any wonder that we distrust the process?

I’ve been trying to work on some formula or analogy to boil the whole process down into something easily remembered for everyone else going through this. The IEP process is often either a poker game or a chess match.

If it’s a poker game, this one often starts where the person across the table expects to see all your cards before betting, but you can’t do likewise. If it’s chess, the expectation seems to be that you’re expected to announce your moves three moves ahead of time. Either way, these things may be built into the process as expectations, but once you show you know the difference between ‘expectations’ and ‘the actual rules’, things change quickly. Just the way things have changed makes us retroactively more suspicious of the process.

Honestly, most of the people we’ve talked to have been genuinely nice and somewhere between OK and quite helpful. I suspect that the process might be gamed by people far above them and much of this may not be the fault of the people working with the parents.

Even if they have the best possible intentions, though, when certain things lead us to understandably begin to mistrust the process, what do you think is going to win out – our fierce devotion to our son’s future or the idea that we should just trust the school system? The latter may be true, but you can’t compete with a parent’s resolve for their kids.

I feel like things actually are going in the right direction at the moment. I talked at length to the child psych on Friday and felt positive about our conversation. I think she’s hearing us well and drawing conclusions that are in line with ours.

There are still the details to iron out, but it feels much better now than it did two weeks ago. Of course, ask me next week and maybe I’ll say something different. Hope not…