Tomorrow is the Monster’s annual IEP meeting.

Now, I know it’s not been “a year” since his last IEP, since we agreed on the IEP that sent him to Gateway at the end of July.  Still, his annual IEP has always been March-to-March, and in spite of how long last year’s took… it’s that time of year again.

But I’m feeling good about tomorrow.

For starters, last Thursday, we had a pre-IEP run-through with the school-based team, where we received the reports from them in person, and reviewed them already.  We’ve gone over their proposed adjustments to the service levels for next year and the objectives as they’d like to update them, and I think neither of us have any major objections to any of the things they’re going to bring up.  The team has the Monster’s best interests at heart, care for him as much as we do, and there’s no matter of us having to struggle to put him in a school for next year where he belongs – he’s at the place that he does belong.

Where we do diverge, it’s not in meaningful fashions.  We’d like to see a few more academic things added into the mix – he’s still well behind on reading and math – but they did raise excellent points that he tends to do other things that work against any attempt to further catch him up at the moment.  They’re working on the basics, and those’ll be the building-blocks to catch him up when he’s ready.  Other things – like the proposed amount of speech therapy – we’re placated by the fact that any fall-off in the service is really more than made up for how they integrate it into the rest of the day anyway.

But it is night and day from how it was last year, when we knew that the school-based team at Mount Washington were on our side, but were faced also with a central-office team that was certainly not as interested in the best outcome for our son.  And while I loved working with our advocates and the attorney – all of whom were worth what we paid them and much, much more – I will admit that our checking account is far happier this year, when we can carry our own water in this fight.

I’m actually so confident that we’re going to have a reasonable discussion for an IEP meeting that I’m still planning on being at the office by lunch on Thursday…