A rare Saturday post, yes.  I figured that after I got bogged down with real life the last few days, I owed you all an update on what’s going on.

So yesterday was the meeting with the IEP coordinator and a parent-teacher conference with his general educator.

Now… realize that we don’t have the same issues with general educator that we do with his therapists.  His general educator is a wonderful, warm woman who tries her best to make sure we’re up to date – or at least that’s how I feel about it – but just doesn’t necessarily tell us everything that we want to be hearing.  With her, though, I have her email address so I can reach out if she’s not answering our questions in the composition book that travels back and forth in the Monster’s bag.

On the other hand, I don’t have contact information for the therapists.  We hear from the speech therapist on and off in the form of her standardized reports that tell us nothing, and the occupational therapist only bothered to contact us after I wrote my initial email to the coordinator.

We went into the meeting yesterday expecting a fight.

As I expected, neither therapist made themselves available for the meeting.  The coordinator also included the principal and the general educator, so it was a decently attended meeting in the coordinator’s office.

Both the principal and the coordinator expressed a lot of concern on our opinion on how the speech therapist is doing – this is, of course, coupled with our speech evaluation from Kennedy Krieger in the recent days – because they feel that she’s wonderful and very results-oriented, so they were horrified to hear that we feel she’s doing a horrible job.  (I did emphasize that we’re not saying she’s a bad speech therapist, but rather that she’s not responsive to our concerns.)  Apparently, it seems this therapist is very stuck in her ways with how she handles her students, and is resistant to doing things any other way – the principal did take it on herself to make sure that the therapist starts to be more communicative with us.

In terms of the occupational therapist, it apparently was more a matter of just making her aware of what we want, and she’s already promised to be more communicative about what is going on, going forward – to the point that she invited one of us to come observe so we know what techniques she’s using.

And likewise, the general educator has invited the same, any time we’d like to come in, and she’s fairly certain that it will not pose a distraction to the class (which is now up to 6-and-6).

Fortunately, both therapists come in on Tuesdays, so I think the wife’ll be dropping in soon (which leaves me free to deal with the baby)…

Do I think all the problems are fixed?  No.  Do I think that the team understands why we’re not happy and will be making efforts to help us?  Yes.  And that last one is what matters to me.