Of IEPs and Heartburn

‘Twas the night before our IEP meeting… blah blah blah.

[Catch up on the whole IEP saga here.]

Getting past our IEP meeting with the school system tomorrow can’t come soon enough. For obvious reasons, J-Man’s 3rd birthday is in a few days and he ages out of Early Intervention so we are off that wagon after Labor Day. So, the school has to kick in with something next week or we’re going to end up having one of those – as we like to say – come to Jesus moments with everybody.

Basically, the rule is that after you are deemed eligible for school and services, the first day school is open on or after their 3rd birthday, your child gets to go and the related services kick in (if you’re approved for them). So here we are, a week before his theoretically possible kinda start date of school and we have no earthly idea what his placement and related services will be. I’ve been griping about how dumb it is to cut the whole thing this close and leave parents in a lurch, but I might as well be griping at the wall. It’s not like anyone on the IEP team can do anything about that.

To make matters more interesting, our county is on both a year-round and traditional calendar school year depending on what school you go to. AND, year-round schools are divided into four tracks, only three of which are in session at any given time. Supposedly, all special ed preschool is on the fourth track – though no one seems to be able to confirm this – meaning they are in session as I write this and will be until the end of September, at which point they have a three-week break. However, if it by some chance is on a different track, one of the tracks is currently not in session and won’t be for another four weeks.

So here we are unable to tell his current private preschool whether Friday is our last day or not, and we’re also unable to tell any of his therapists whether this week is our final week with them. And we generally can’t schedule squat in our calendar until we know what’s going on.

And to make it more up in the air, while we may find out the nature of our school placement tomorrow, almost assuredly we will not know the exact placement tomorrow. I’m not sure when they’ll actually tell us. We could be either on traditional calendar or year-round calendar (we prefer the latter) and we could be driving two miles or to Outer Mongolia (we live in a big county) every day.

So I have enough (admittedly understandable) heartburn to light up a Christmas tree. Ugh. I’m really ready for this to be over. It’s not helping that J-Man can string together some horrible fits these days and is showing us just how wonderful the autistic version of the terrible-almost-threes is. Transitions are just the pits lately.

Looking on the bright side, I still think this will work out close to our ideal situation. I feel positive about how the IEP team seems to have reached the appropriate conclusions to this point. I think some of us might not be on each other’s Christmas card lists this year, but as I’ve said before, this isn’t personal between us and the schools, though our relationship with them has improved significantly of late. We’re here to get this done and move on with what he needs to continue to make progress.

So, wish us luck. We’ll let you know how it goes.

Posts that hopefully are similar:

• IEP Results – The Short Version
• Preschool and IEP – The Adventure Begins!
• Big IEP/Preschool Evaluation Now Behind Us
• Hear! Hear!
• Down the Home Stretch with the IEP (We hope)
• It Takes a School Village to Make a Great IEP
• Giving Thanks for Therapists – A Season of Transitions

Tagged as: Behavior, Early Intervention, IEP, Preschool, School, Stress