"Not qualified"

[amazeofgrace]

I have an IEP for difficult child II next month (they stretched it well past the mandatory 30 days).

I spoke at length with the head of the Special Education department here in town (Mr. Harvey) about difficult child II and the upcoming meeting. he advised me against bringing difficult child II's in home therapist, crisis management SW, or FSO advocate. Stating that none of them are qualified to be giving their opinions on difficult child II's educational enviroment.

Well I am bringing all of them anyways, they were less then flattered when i shared his opinion with them. LOL

Sigh....of course when I RSVP'd for me and 3 guests the School's SW called me to ask if I was bringing an attorney. I should have said "good idea" but I told her "no, not yet"

 

[Andy]

My difficult child got very mad at me awhile back when I shared something that happened at home with his teacher. He doesn't want his teacher to know about our problems at home. During a parent/teacher/student conference, I explained to him that the home (mom) and school (teacher)need to know what/how he is doing in both places. We can not completely and truely help him if we don't work as a team and we can not work as a team if we don't share the bad things as well as the good things.

Your school has to understand your 24 hour issues if they are to find the best way to teach your child. Because, your difficult child's behaviours do not disappear at school, they are waiting for the time to show themselves and the school better be prepared to handle it in the most appropriate ways.

You take all the support you can to that meeting. The school needs to start accepting your input and start communicating with you to be a team not SD against mom. Maybe your "support staff" can get SD to understand this.

The "It doesn't matter how they behave at home as long as they follow directions at school" doesn't fly in my books. A caring SD will look at the entire picture and offer help before a blow out.

 

[Martie]

One way to "make home matter" to the SD is to write HOMEWORK modifications into the IEP if getting it done is a problem and making your "family time" more difficult. They will say that "homework" is your problem, but it is not. If school REALLY wanted homework done, they would keep schools open until 5:00 so kids could get support for doing it.

According to some of the research I have done with the membership of this board HOMEWORK is an extremely difficult problem...Personally it was a huge problem, so I got homework modification written into ex-difficult child's IEP. The modification was NO homework that couldn't be done at school during a free period. If he couldn't do it n 45 minutes, they were assigning too much. It REALLY made the teachers cooperate and think aobut what they were assigning. The math teacher was indignant that she could just routinely hand out 50 problems when the rest of the other teachers pointed out that with a test average of 98 in math NOT doing any homework at all, the math teacher probably didn't have a very good claim on any of the 45 minutes. She was miffed, but this is how teachers should think about homework in my opinion.

If your SD balks, tell them that YOU CANNOT help...it requires that they have no "guilt handle" on you or that you do not feel inferior in saying you can't help...n my case, they rather knew I was refusing to jeopardize my relationship with ex-difficult child by fighting all the time over homework....in other words, the sort of believed that I probably COULD assist in his homework, but it is something to watch out for...

If the SD says homework is REQUIRED by policy, then you need to get the policy individualized so that not doing it, has no impact on difficult child's grades. This is an accommodation in grading....I don't like it particularly, becasue it teaches difficult children it's OK to ignore assignments but it is VERY important to try to keep schools from pushing kids out by failing them until they have no motivation left...

I wrote this and don't even know if homework is your particular issues, but if it is not yours, it will be someone's.

Best to you,

Martie