FINALLY!!

I had Dylan's meeting with the school district on Friday.  I will be honest, going in, I was scared.  I was really worried that I would have a surprise and they would decide that he wasn't going to qualify for services.......well, luckily, he qualifies for services.  Whew and double whew.

His amazing 4K teacher had taken the time to fill out some paperwork for the evaluation and I had filled some out as well.  I was AMAZING how close we were when they scored it in almost every area.  They couple that we were a little further off still weren't far and they were areas that they expected that.

I was impressed with the principal and how seriously he took our concerns that Dylan is a runner when he gets upset.  His comment was that "he needs to have someone stuck to him like glue on the playground" until we know exactly how he is going to react to situations while at school.  When we got to the last section of the IEP where we talked about what services he would be getting, his principal said that he wanted him put down for 33.5 hours with an aide available in his classroom.  I have a feeling that HE may have to fight for that one a bit but he was pretty firm that he felt strongly that's how it needed to be put down for D.  I'll be curious to see how it's exactly worded when I get the IEP or if I get a call about that one in the next week.  He will also be getting 90 minutes of OT time each week....about 60 minutes of that will be in the classroom and used for transitioning back into the classroom after his 30 minutes of pull out therapy.

Several people have asked what kinds of goals we set for him and how that is going to work since we're basically writing an IEP for next fall only "guessing" how he's going to react to certain situations.  Honestly, I can't remember what they all were right now since, if you've been to an IEP meeting you know that we talked about A LOT of stuff in that 2 hours.  I know there is a goal for OT, safety, calming himself, behavior and ????  I will do a post with more details about all of that when I have the IEP in hand.

I also found out that the kindergarten teacher who was at the meeting is also going to be his teacher next year and honestly, I could have cried when I found out.  Kira had her for the 2nd half of the year and I just loved her.  She has a very structured classroom and already uses a lot of visual aides for her students which D really does well with.  He'll also have the same OT that Kira has had since she was 3...he knows who she is and really likes her.

Overall I feel REALLY good about the plan that have in place.  It's very possible that once he gets into the classroom and the year is underway that we could find that this IEP or the goals just aren't appropriate.  If that happens we'll have to meet and re-do things.

But just having a plan in place and them being aware of our concerns makes me feel a lot better.