At today's IEP meeting to discuss adding Assistive Technology to DD's IEP we spent most of our time discussing her current status, especially the fact that her anxiety has come flooding back. (She is back to leaving the classroom several times a day with various somatic complaints.) This gave me the chance to say a few things publicly that up until now I have said only in private conversations. The teacher made clear to all in attendance that she really, truly doesn't get it. (i.e In response to a recommendation that DD be excluded from copying either close up or far away - "But sometimes the class is required to copy something down after the para has left for the day. What am I supposed to do then?") A few things I feel so much better about expressing:

- DD's disabilities don't magically disappear just because the para is not there

- DD's right to services doesn't change just because the para's not there

- We will not allow you to place the responsibility for these accommodations on the shoulders of an 8 year old

- We will never agree to requiring DD to raise her hand in front of her classmates and publicly display her disabilities in order to request accommodations that she is entitled to and is supposed to receive automatically

- Of course there are times that she asks to do things the way her classmates are doing them - she doesn't want to appear to be different

- Yes she formed a very nice 8 or 9 word sentence for the OT in the span of about 8-10 minutes. Compare that to this 3 page story she dictated and had scribed in the same amount of time. It obviously takes all her mental energy to concentrate on forming the letters - there is nothing left for content

- I showed them a completely illegible note she recently wrote herself and asked them to try to decipher it. Whenever they tried to approach the idea of DD doing her own writing I raised it in the air and pointed to it

- No adult in the school has ever picked up on an her anxiety without her reporting a somatic complaint or asking to speak to the SW.

- She does not leave any of her service providers (OT, speech or spec ed) with these complaints - only her regular classroom

- At PT conference last fall the first thing the teacher said was how s-l-o-w DD is putting her things away in the morning despite a dyspraxia diagnosis which means she does everything slowly. Gee I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that she asks to go to the nurse as soon as she arrives at school in the morning. Do you think that just maybe she is getting some sort of message that she's not meeting your standards? That she needs to hurry up? That you are not happy with her??????

As a result of this discussion we did not get very far in addressing the AT needs so we will have to reconvene in 2 weeks. Our consultant thinks today was really important, though, because they are realizing that no matter how hard they try they are just not meeting DD's needs. At a minimum we have already shown a need for a full time para (she currently has one 19 hours per week) and an iPad. We didn't even get to the training needed on the iPad or the prescriptive PE that was recently mentioned. Hopefully they are seeing the writing on the wall about the need for out of district placement.

Will keep you posted.