Well, maybe some of you remember, but I advocated for DS to move from autistic support to regular ed for his Kindergarten this year. It was a long and difficult battle with lots of phone calls and meetings and research on my part.
Well, yesterday was the first day of school and it was pretty much a disaster. I got called to have an emergency meeting today. I had been in communication with the teacher before school started and she knew to expect a rough transition into school. It was super rough. She was positive when I picked him up though and confident today would be a better day.
Today when I went to drop off my son I waited until the PCA arrived (I always did this in preschool with the TSS and no one at the school asked me to leave or anything). After about half an hour I just figured something must be up with the PCA and continued to stay with DS. At some point the teacher stopped by to thank me and said she was amazed how different he was with me there. She was very pleased with his behavior and participation.
They finally found a different PCA who wasn't busy to cover DS around 10:30. No one has any idea where his assigned PCA is today. I waited around a bit for my meeting, seriously concerned that they were going to put him back in special ed. The whole team showed up for the meeting and that was a shock. The lady who changed the NOREP to the typical classroom (director of special ed for the district) was in charge. I felt like I had let her down! As the teacher went over all of the trouble of yesterday she just listened. Then the teacher talked about how amazing he was today with me there.
Surprisingly the director of special ed said "Then we need to learn what mom is doing and train the PCA to do it." She also said kids like him can sometimes take months to make the transition into school and we need to give him time to settle in. No one was surprised the first day was as bad as it was. Well, I was surprised just how bad it actually was, but I had been expecting a rough start.
I gave them some pointers and we all decided a good place to start would be increasing his trust of the staff he will be with. We agreed that he will get some special 1:1 time with the teacher and PCA doing a preferred activity like being read to to help him become more comfortable with taking directions from them. At that point I was pretty happy. I also really like his teacher.
Then I brought up once again that the IEP still does not include his cognitive scores in present levels. I'm not currently looking for any special programming, but I do want my son officially identified as gifted. He did score above the cutoff (130) and the test was done by the school psychologist. Well, they told me that they don't allow any children in the gifted program who have behavior issues. They also said that there is a checklist of things the kids need to have other than high IQ including high leadership ability and high maturity/social skills to be included in the gifted program. They said that a socially/emotionally immature child like my son would not qualify for gifted programming because it is not determined by just IQ.
They also said it's a language arts based program and there is no math at all. It's all reading books and writing essays to analyze them. They said it's not for mathy kids like my son anyway. I said that my son is quite gifted at reading as well. Maybe not as much as he is at math, but at least 2-3 grade levels above K. I also said he is not ready to write essays.
Any way you look at it, there seems to be no chance that my son will be given gifted services there, even if he does get the behavior part down. As for right now I'm not worried about it, but in a few months we may be in a different place. I think DS would love a pull out program with challenging math or just a chance to play board games or logic games with the gifted kids. In fact, I think it would be the highlight of his day. But apparently the gifted pullout is very much set and is only one thing. And only available to perfect kids. Doesn't this violate ADA? And common sense?
And as far as his day after I left and the new PCA took over? One incident at lunch where he was trying to crawl under the table. The rest of the day he did great. The teacher even sent me a picture in the afternoon of him working nicely with another child on an art project. Hopefully what happened yesterday never happens again. DS has a lot of anxiety and I think he just couldn't control himself. Today when I left him with the PCA and asked him if he was OK with me leaving he said no. I asked why. "Because of yesterday." He was scared he would lose control like that again. But he held it together. I'm very proud of him
