This afternoon, we’re meeting with the advocate who joined us last year for the Monster’s first IEP meeting.

I think these prep sessions that we do with her annual are very good for us – it reminds us to distill down the laundry list of the goals we want to see him getting to, into something that fulfills those SMART criteria that make sense for the school to concentrate on.  This year’s list was alright, I think, in retrospect, but we can do better next year.

To me, the biggest problem still is the fact that we don’t have what I’d consider enough information for the IEP session on Tuesday.

We received the draft IEP from his special education teacher yesterday morning.  It’s twenty-four pages of verbiage, a lot of which are the summary of the various teachers’ findings from the last school year, coupled with their goals for next year…

First, I’m not really thrilled that I feel like the IEP has all they’re going to report on vis-a-vis the providers’ impressions of where he is currently.  Last year, we had detailed reports from all of his providers, and this year, it’s literally a paragraph or two as part of the IEP.  I’m not sure if this is something I ought to be expecting or no… but I feel like it’s really insufficient information for trying to encourage the district to have a full picture of what he’s capable of currently.

Second, this one doesn’t yet specify that he needs ESY.  (I’ve already let the special educator know that we’re requesting it.)

Third, the provisions for his specialists for next year are at the same level as they are this year – I think that’s far from sufficient.  The OT is very clear that he’s not really progressing as far as she’d like, and yet she’s still only specifying the same pull-out as this school year.  There’s that old adage that “doing the same thing and expecting a different result is insanity”, and we’re at that point.  If he’s not doing well – his bilateral coordination needs a lot of work and he doesn’t have a clear dominant hand – then he needs more OT, plain and simple.

And finally… while I’m only right now just browsing through the document’s goals, it seems that some of them are either far above his level or so nebulous as to the point that I don’t have any idea how they intend to accomplish them.  The former is more of an issue of my worrying that he’ll be frustrated if he can’t do them, while the latter more entails my asking them how they intend to measure the progress to prove he’s made it there.

One thing I don’t see on here is a physical therapy evaluation – the special educator had mentioned she was going to have a consult due to a concern she had in the classroom – so I think I need to follow up on that as well…