We recently moved to a new school district, and hired a pit-bull advocate to try and convince the new school district to either pay for the non-public Aspergers school we privately placed him in, or come up with a special day class that actually meets his needs. (The previous district was a nightmare, wouldn't fund the shared aide specified in his IEP. When the sh#t hit the fan and the other parents staged a classroom boycott, the school tried to move him into an SDC for intellectually impaired kids.)
The head of special ed for the district met with us to find out why we were unwilling to start with a general ed placement, since that was what his last signed IEP specified. (It turns out the old district didn't include the dozen Behavior Emergency Reports when they sent over the record!) Our advocate didn't give many details yet, but strongly insisted that DS would remain unilaterally placed until their team had done their evaluations and observations and held the annual IEP meeting. The director agreed to move up his tri-annual (due next spring) and do it now. The various members of the IEP team (speech, OT, psychologist, etc) actually called and started scheduling assessments, rather than waiting for the 60 day clock to run to the end!
So far, he's met with the speech therapist. He kept hitting the test ceiling on all the language related tests. She said she'd never seen a child be so physically wiggly and yet be able to attend so well to the questions being asked. I had asked if she would be performing any tests of pragmatics. She gave me a questionnaire for me and his teacher to fill out. We both scored it similarly, about equally divided between "sometimes" and "often" on all the questions, with no "never" or "always". She scored it and said it was "no concern" from me and "borderline" from the teacher. She said his pragmatics looked good to her while observing him during the testing, but if I was really concerned, she was willing to do the Test of Pragmatic Language. (The speech therapist in the previous district had no idea what pragmatics even were, and lumped 10 different things into one goal!)
Here's the amazing thing -- she promised to have the report of her evaluation to me before the IEP, which I really appreciated. She went ahead and gave me a preview of what various scores were (the ones that were easy to score.) Then about two hours after the eval was done, she actually CALLED ME ON THE PHONE, to give me the results of the pragmatics test! I was so floored. Such a different attitude than the previous district. It gives me hope.
27 Oct 2013, 9:38 am
