Had the Independent FBA meeting today...

[buddy]

at 8:30. Our home Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) psychiatric, the school psychiatric (ugg), the psychiatric we hired to do the FBA and .... ta da..... the high school psychiatric. I walked right up to her and said, who are you and what are you doing here? the sp ed coordinator quickly (before my legal rep walked in... she is a-scaaard of her I think) said who she was and said since Q is to go to this high school next year we thought it would be good for her to be involved in this for transition. Whatever.... he everything changes every few months. Maybe INTSTEAD of our school psychiatric??? How many licensed psychologists does it take to write a decent pbip?.....LOL

SO, they had us go thru the old fba and behavior plan (well OLD in that we did it at the end of last school year... not really so many months doing the new bip) and there were plenty of opportunities for me to correct the psychiatric. Independent psychiatric asked if he had ever had a conditional procedure...guess what school psychiatric said... LAST year that Q went after him so he grabbed him and held him for 5 minutes. I said, really, do I have a copy of that?? He said I called you it was on a Friday and blah blah. IF he did, he never said that it was a restraint. I NEVER got a written report about that EVER. I am good about that stuff. Laywer was all over that and NOT happy and asked sp ed coordinator to get that right away so they are getting his documentation which during the meeting he admitted he likely never wrote up. This is the same guy that said that he grabbed Q by the arm and told him he was not going anywhere and was suggesting to the Speech Language Pathologist (SLP) to do that before lunch... I told him he was nuts that if he aggressed on Q like tha the owuld aggress on me like that too. YOu should have seen the eyes on the two other psychs!

HE is also the psychiatric that shoved Q into a chair in front of me... that is THREE times he has admitted to, how many more times did it happen I dont know about? They all admitted they ahve never held Q down that they have had to deflect him a little but he can always be herded to wherever he needs to go if needed.

I think this independent person is getting my point that they are egging him on. OUR psychiatric said to the team, what he feels is important to get on record is that this is not a child with up and down mental health issues that will get better with certain medications etc... He is permanently brain injured and we need to not have to keep coming to the table trying to explain that to people. I was beside myself happy that we are spending our waiver monies on this guy... HE IS SOOOO GOOD. THEy went thru the functions of behavior and she looked at it and said, yeah, I can see that these things can be a part but this is a complex kid and he is also probably just doing what his brain makes him do.... not really a function to it. OMGOSH! How many times have I tried to tell people that???

The law person said that she wanted it on record that I had called her in because I felt that there were some people in the school working at odds with the plan and being overly zealous about behaviors that were not hte target behaviors we were working on and things were being made worse because of it so she wanted it clear that when we did this ALL people had to come to the meetings and be a part of this. SP ed coordinator said oh and he WANTS to be a part of it and law person said in front of everyone, I highly doubt that. (NO he was not there today of course)

The documents that they passed out had words and things we had taken out before I signed the significant change. AT the end of the meeting I aske dht eteacher and coordinator about that and they said, yeah htey saw that too an it would be taken out. It said he had tried to expose himself... that has NEVER happened... they were at one time saying what IF he tried that. and they tried to put in a bunch of if his words became actions and the psychiatric said vocal tics do not mean he will do it and in fact he never has. SO they said it would be gone by today... I will get a new official copy.

SO, instead of immediately doing a new fba she is going to do a consult on the current one which is what I had orignially asked for... fo rher to look at what they did, then watch him and see if it matches. To see if they are really doing what the behavior plan asks for and if not then where are the issues and how can we change it.... or if so then are there things we should dump or add?? She is going to observe for two days, interview only the teacher and the DAPE instructor who lvoes Q, sees him daily and has known him 3rd thru 8th grade. (and her mom had a brain injury so she is the one who had cued me into what was going wrong with the aides last year and why I asked for an FBA to be re done last year)

Turns out the law person called the independent psychiatric and told her to pay close attention to the school psychiatric and the principal. After the meeting she said that they had locked eyes when school psychiatric was talikng and independent person actually rolled her eyes.. she was catching on I think... I hope...


ON TO OTHER NEWS>>> Q wore his auditory trainer two days and I was told that he actually chose not to take it off at all. He likes that it blocks out other people. She said she had 50 straight teaching mintues at a time and lots of other good moments the first day he used it. Lets hope no one makes it into a battle if it is working that well.

Marching on..........

 

[TeDo]

AWESOME!!! Awesome!! Awesome!! I just LOVE sticking it to uncooperative sd personnel. I REALLY hope the independent psychiatric sees the REAL picture and that the school psychiatric & principal don't steer clear just because that person is there. THAT would NOT be a good thing......this time.

Glad the auditory trainer is working. Sometimes little things like that can make all the difference!!

 

[klmno]

This sounds so promising!! Good job, Mom!!

 

[susiestar]

You are so awesome as Q's advocate!!! I am FURIOUS that they aggressed on Q and didn't document - do you know what would happen if Q did something? OMG the documentation of how "awful" he is would be wallpapered all over the town. But let someone who KNOWS BETTER do it and well, they pretend to call and tell you and they then don't document and don't think their should be any repercussions to them. in my opinion the guy can and should go find a new job away from kids. NO WAY should he be allowed to just not document something, but of course it happens all the time.

I am seriously wondering how often the guy has grabbed/pushed/pulled/been aggressive to Q. It is just so wrong. Of coures I never trust school's documentation anyway. Which is sad because I do know that most who work with kids really want to and really care - raised by teachers after all, lol. Maybe that is why I get so irate when they are abusive - I know how hoard the rest work to not be that way!

I love the independent person and yoru law person. Esp the eye rolling - that is priceless!!! Clearly seh has caught on to the CYA BS and is going to actually look at what they do, not what they say they do.

Go Q for using his new thingy!!!!

 

[buddy]

Thanks guys...

SUSIE... ME TOO! I really have to assume that for every time we know about.... there are many we dont know about. And how scary is it he just out and out says it in front of people and has no clue it is so wrong.

This guy... I know he also did lots of this to the little girl I worked with when she was there in 6th grade. She is a female q but with deep fears of men, and super super touch defensive. He would constantly... I mean daily touch this girl... when she would flip he would go to restraint mode. He really does not see his part in it. I really dont usually go this far in what I say but this guy needs to lose his job. He may just have put a nail in that coffin today.

 

[susiestar]

Buddy, I totally trust you when you say he needs to lose his job. Just hearing about him with Q and the girl makes me afraid for all the kids at his mercy. I doubt that any adult in the school would tell him to stop and that scares me even more. Is there a way you can get it put in the IEP that this guy cannot touch Q under any circumstances?

Restraints are such a funny thing. They can be a very good, useful, needed tool but also can be abuse. Wiz was homeschooled for grades 3 and 4 because our district had him suicidal at 7yo. They were so backward, did things that were not okay when I was in school in the 70's and were WAY not okay in the 90s, but since he was "strange" it was okay to do them to him. We moved and I enrolled him in 5th grade in a sp ed class that was self contained. He had the option to go to the reg class any time he watned but he did that twice and told us that if he had to listen to "that idiot" he would end up hurting someone. He was talking about the teacher. Sadly, I agreed with-his assessment of the reg ed teacher.

We were blessed with the sp ed teacher and the aides. One teacher and 2 aides and 3 students in the room. SOme students that were mainstreamed, but in the class there were just the 3 for most of the year. Tehy were awesome. That year they did three therapeutic restraints. None of Wiz, thankfully. He did really well, and they were a HUGE help to us. Two years later the teacher went to another district for a better job. The new teacher triggered every kid every day. She and her new aides (she refused to work with the aides that had been there because they were the other teacher's aides and were "used" - not logical thinking, in my opinion because they were amazing at their jobs) averaged three restraints a day with just six kids in the class. A DAY. And she could not see how she was causing the restraints.

This guy sounds like he sees restraints as his primary job. That scares me and I hope the staff sees how wrong he is. Your lawyer may be able to make firing him a sound financial move for the district because he did not document what he did to Q and that is a HUGE HUGE HUGE violation. These have to be documented and put in the file and if it didn't happen and they admit it, then the logical question is how often has this guy done it and not written up the report, and then the question is was it really the right way to handle the situation? because if it was the right way to handle things, then it would get written up.

There is often no real reason to have to get physical with the kids. There was a girl with intermittent explosive disorder in my dad's last school (he retired about six yrs ago from teaching jr high). She could be walking down the hall hitting lockers, literally bouncing from one side of the hall to the other hitting things and hollering but if she saw my dad she stopped and smiled and walked nicely. Why? If I don't Mr. S will bite my neck.

My dad told at least half of his kids if they got out of line he would bite their neck. This was long before twilight and the vampire craze. He never would have, but the kids just didn't know. It was so cute to watch her, and some of the other kids.

Does Q listen to audiobooks? Have they tried those to help calm him? When Wiz was little my dad recorded Uncle Wiggily stories onto cassettes. We couldn't play them on the car stereo because hsi voice is deep and soothing and it put husband and I to sleep! But after we told him how they helped Wiz, he gave a copy to the sp ed teacher at his school and they found them very helpful. His voice is sort of similar to that of the dad on Happy Days and it was really really effective. The stories are so not stimulating, and not violent that they don't trigger that sort of thing(big problem we had with Wiz) and I know it was helpful for some of the kids in the psychiatric hospital when the therapist there played one for the room. (This was when Wiz spent 4 mos in a psychiatric hospital in 6th grade.) I wonder if something like that might be helpful with Q, esp when he is triggered by this aggressive school psychiatric.