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.

Mind you, of course, that ‘adequately prepared’ to me means being ready with what we think is important, and prepared to fight to prevent them from including or discussing the late reports.

Of course, there’s that old adage that no plan survives contact with the enemy/human race.

The wife and I arrived early at the school and re-reviewed the draft IEP so we could be sure that we remembered what was important to us… but that wasn’t, in the end, the complete purpose of today’s meeting.  It turns out that Baltimore City Public Schools makes its Extended School Year (ESY) decisions before March 1st – the IEP coordinator for the Monster’s school was doing her best to ensure that they could make a ruling in favor prior to that date.  Everything else was really secondary… but we did take the chance to also open up where we think that the Monster is, vis-a-vis his goals and the proposed goals for next year.

The coordinator had, apparently, planned for the meeting to be less than ninety minutes.  We ended up running over a bit while we critiqued where they were on the progress, on things that we want included for next year’s IEP… and then nothing else happened.  (We did all agree on ESY.)

The problem is that the OT didn’t show up, but was ‘excused’ based on the fact that she serves multiple schools.  I voiced to the coordinator that this has been an ongoing problem – that we’ve had numerous issues with communication with the OT and that we feel this to be far, far insufficient given that the Monster’s biggest deficiency is his fine motor skills – and we’ll have a follow-up conversation next week to close the gaps.  As it stands, though, the IEP is still open…