Thanks so much everyone, especially aeh for your expertise in how this should look in the IEP. Now I know exactly what to ask for. Like I said, for now I'm going to drop the idea of getting him in the actual gifted program. Not only do I want to stay on their good side at the moment as far as remaining in regular ed goes, but I also think the gifted program sounds horrible.
Honestly, who would want to be found gifted in the district? Extra essay writing sounds like punishment for any child. I get the feeling the program is filled with a few high achievers and the actual gifted population is languishing in regular programming because they aren't the perfect high achieving bum smoochers the district is looking for in their elite programming. I was actually told that the gifted programmer is "very intense" and that she has very strong ideas about how her program should be run. It sounded like the people at the meeting were afraid to mess with her or suggest anything to her or send her a child who disrupted her perfect life. Whatever.
The teacher is willing to differentiate regardless of the IEP, but I still want this stuff in there in case, for whatever reason, she is not able to do so often enough or effectively enough. I don't feel like it should be all on her either. She also mentioned to me that she has no idea what to do for him right now because she can't think of any way to differentiate the counting to 10 that the kids are currently working on. I noticed on Wednesday that she was asking DS some harder questions during circle, like what is the word for animals that sleep during the day. Of course before he answered another kid called it out :P
Yesterday was another good day for him. Apparently everything was going really well until the end when another kid took a toy from DS and when DS tried to take it back the boy hit him. After that was resolved DS went back to playing with the toy. A little later the teacher called for clean up, which DS apparently did not hear. A girl came over and started putting away his toy and he flipped out. I think that the earlier incident still had him upset.
Overall I am very happy with how he is doing and so is the teacher. I asked her yesterday if she thought that regular ed would work out for him and she said yes, he's doing great for only 3 days into the school year. The first day everyone was sure it was not going to work out. I almost pulled him out of school. Glad I decided to give it at least a week and see if he improved!
Another interesting thing. I expected there would be an aide in the classroom, but there is only the one teacher. 3 of the kids have PCA's, my son and another boy for behavior and one girl for medical needs. I believe there are 26 kids in the class (or was it 28?) Whatever the number is, the teacher told me the class is full. I was asking her whether she had a high number of kids who need extra help this year or if her current class is typical now that inclusion rates are up. She said in prior years they would keep one class at 20 students (which was rotated each year between the teachers and contained all of the kids who needed extra help) and they would use the extra space for mainstreaming. She said they have no space and cannot mainstream this year (She actually said there is a waiting list for K, how does that even work?) But I'm wondering if they fought so hard to keep DS in the special ed classroom because it's currently not full and they have no space in regular ed? I'm also wondering about the whole "mainstreamed for 20% of the day" thing that was included in the original NOREP. Were they ever planning on doing that? I think I now know why they were so insistent that it be during specials like lunch, recess, and music. They never intended to mainstream him in the actual typical classroom. It's a miracle these people managed to hire a good teacher. She also gives the kids playtime, although it's currently not supposed to be in the districts K curriculum. So glad we got her!
Last edited by PanzerAzelSaturn; 09/04/15 09:53 AM.
