The biggest problem with the school year ending, and with the bus problem being unresolved, is that there are differing opinions about what I ought to be doing about the problem.
There’s really no good course of action – three days later, the Baltimore City Public Schools have still not answered any of my emails regarding the matter. There is no positive purpose to the “ignore it and he’ll go away” logic since, plainly, the Monster is returning to their schools in the fall. Continue reading
The bussing issue reared its ugly head again.
For anyone who is new to my blog – or doesn’t follow my tweet feed – the Monster is bussed from our house to his elementary school and back each day. The school he attends is not our zone school, which is five minutes away and roughly in our neighborhood, but all the way across the city. His bus ride, on a good day, is somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five minutes. Continue reading
With the school year drawing towards its conclusion, we’re starting our planning for next year.
The IEP’s essentially been agreed to for the moment – the one that we handled two months back for ESY placement (see my post The Non Event) – but the one thing that’s still in the air is where the Monster’s going to go to school in August. That decision was going to be deferred until later this spring. Continue reading
This morning, I woke up to an update from the Monster’s teacher, regarding how he’s doing in school.
We don’t normally get out-of-band updates from her – she’s very good about using the communication log to let us know when there’s something unusual that we need to be aware of or to communicate when things are going on in the classroom – so I have to admit that I’d been somewhat nervous about what she might be reaching out for. (Especially when the email simply has the subject of ‘update’.) Continue reading
We’re sending the Monster to summer camp again this year.
Last year, his summer was divided between the camp at the JCC – trying to give him at least a little bit of a ‘normal’ Jewish environment – and a speech/language program run by Towson University. This meant running different directions on different days, but it was good for him and kept him occupied in the mornings. Continue reading
As a technologist, I look at the IEP as something of a requirements document – it specifies the goals for his services for the coming year, and the acceptance criteria to decide whether or not the goals have been met. As everything out there reminds us, these goals should be SMART – Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. Continue reading
About two weeks ago, we got notification for the Monster’s IEP review meeting.
For those of you who follow my tweet feed, you’ve heard me whining about how the paperwork was all late. Maryland state law requires paperwork to be delivered five business days before the meeting to be admissible for discussion, and none of it arrived on time. Still, we had enough time to review the IEP with the Monster’s advocate, and felt adequately prepared for today’s meeting. Continue reading
The Monster’s IEP meeting is on Tuesday. Yesterday’s meeting with his advocate was very effective – it’s always nice having someone who isn’t directly involved like we are to have a second-set of eyes on the paperwork, more so to look at things that really are quite out of whack. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
The bus saga. Ah, the bus saga. Continue reading