The big question I have for the IEP meeting tomorrow afternoon is one of “where do we go from here”?

I don’t really have a good answer for that, to be honest.  And going over all of the paperwork that was sent to us, I don’t know that the school knows where he’s going either.

The Monster is a very bright child, on the inside, from all indications.  He certainly knows his letters and numbers, and while his handwriting is sufficiently atrocious that he could be teaching penmanship to doctors… there’s not much of an issue of whether or not he can form the letters.  His reading’s coming along slowly, but a lot of that – from what we see at home – is more a matter of his not wanting to do it.  (My child, like many good programmers, can be very lazy and is often so when it comes to doing his homework.)

And as I mentioned yesterday, the school hasn’t really been very good about communicating what the options are beyond his kindergarten year.  We don’t have the slightest idea what programs are available, if any, or what school they might send him to.

What I do know is what I would like to see, given my knowledge of his abilities.

I still have hopes for him to be mainstreamed at some point.  The biggest things holding him back are his tendency to not want to stay seated and his deficit in his ability to communicate effectively.  To be frank, the former’s easily dealt with – to date, his teacher’s had success with an exercise band on his chair to give him enough stimulus to keep him in his seat – but the latter is really the job they’re concentrating on.

Ideally, I’d like to see him in a normal classroom in a year or two, hopefully at our zone elementary school.  I’d like to see him on a track, as quickly as possible, towards the ‘normal’ high school diploma and moving on to college from there.  I don’t want to rush things, but I also don’t want him ‘stuck’ in a track where there’s diminished expectations from him… and I have to admit that there’s a big concern there on that part with the way our local schools operate.

Let’s be honest – it’s “easier” for them to label him and just not worry about where he goes from there, biding time until he’s either old enough to move on or for us to get frustrated and move him of our own volition to a private school setting.

I think this is going to be my major question tomorrow, once we’ve gotten the IEP amendments taken care of and have the re-evaluation set up…