Friday, April 24, 2009

Two hours later and the IEP was over.

I admit two hours was a long time for an IEP, but I got in there and the questions started coming and I got on my high horse and basically wanted an explanation for everything written in the report. For example, in the narrative the psychologist wrote about her classroom observations and she stated that Ryan was pushed down by a classmate while throwing away his trash and that he did not respond. That's it, that's all she said about the incident which left me wondering if she thought he was passive and lacking emotion. When I asked her specifically about this she told me that she was actually impressed that Ryan did not retaliate and remained calm. That's good news, but why couldn't she have taken two more minutes and clarified this instead of leaving it wide open for interpretation?

I knew going into the IEP about standardized testing, but after hearing about it again it was no wonder Ryan received low scores in many areas on the tests. I won't go into all the boring details, but let's just say if he was shown a flashcard with a picture of a train on it and he said choo-choo he would not have been given credit for his answer because the standardized answer is train.

I also got to the bottom of the aggression. The therapists and the psychologist all said that aggression really means impulsive. Okay, fine, then why doesn't the behavior scale say impulsive because in my book those two words are not synonyms.

All and all everyone complimented Ryan and shared that he has many great skills. I appreciate that. I also left the meeting with a much better understanding of how they arrived at the scores, but it still doesn't change the fact that I feel like Ryan now has a blemish on his permanent record. And you and I know that your permanent record stays with you forever.**

1 comment:

datri said...

Our IEP meeting is in a couple of weeks and I'm dreading it. We're trying to get Kayla in a private special ed school because our small rural district is hopeless when it comes inclusion. So, I have to prove that Kayla is so low functioning that it would not be "appropriate" for her to attend the public school options. (not really to hard since she scores below the 1/10 of 1 percentile across all domains) How heartbreaking is that?