Aha, here that's called an IAT or "building plan." Do you have an evaluation report from your dev ped in writing? I'd probably share that information right away, so there can be no doubt that further eval is needed.
I spoke with her office yesterday and they mailed out the evaluation on Wed, so I'm hoping it will come in the mail today.
Good plan. If you know from past experience that they are going to treat you as though you are asking unreasonably for the moon on a platter, might you consider hiring an educational advocate? Or getting the dev ped to come to school meetings with you while you sort this out? Having Our People to speak on our DS's behalf in meetings has made it much easier to get what our DS8 (who has Asperger's) needs.
Unfortunately an advocate isn't in the finances, and her Dev Ped is 90 minutes away, although if it comes down to brass tacks, I would consider either finding a free advocate, or asking her Ped if it would be possible for her to come.
The hardest thing to get at school in our experience is proper social skills training. Few schools are equipped to do this, even though with the number of kids being diagnosed on the spectrum they ought to have the resources in place. SLPs tend to want to focus on articulation, not pragmatic language. We have always had to work on the subtler skills outside of school in our ABA program; but having school PT work on the gross motor has advanced DS's skills considerably.
I will definitely keep that in mind. The SLP that evaluated her at the hospital didn't seem to see pramatic language as a problem, though everyone else, including myself did. Piper's expressive and receptive language were at 16-17 yr old levels, while her pragmatic language tested out at age level. She did say Piper had some trouble with using "politeness markers". It seems to me that if she's functioning that high on expressive and receptive, pragmatic should be in that general area also..or that she at least should have the ability for it to, if that makes sense.
We found that when we got gifted services into the mix, school became more functional for DS, not least because the class size was smaller, but having appropriate work to do was a huge win. Our advocate pushed hard for the school to acknowledge both the disability AND the giftedness.
I'm really hoping that is going to be one thing we won't have trouble with, but time will tell. They've basically been treating me as though they were indulging me with testing her for the past year. I am going to use the guidance counselor who did her homebound teaching last year as a reference. She thought Piper needed subject acceleration then, without having test scores.
I appreciate all the good advice, DeeDee..if anything else comes up I'll def give you a pm
-Amanda
