Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional UPDATE - IEP help - academics, PDD-NOS, allergies

Thank you everyone! It will be an interesting meeting tomorrow. The current health plan we have provides treatment information (when to use what kind of thing) but nothing about prevention and accommodation. He would once again be in an egg-free classroom but we already know from experience that is not enough. We'll have twice as many kids the teacher will need to monitor in terms of what snacks they bring, washing their hands, etc. Knowing the school's relaxed approach to all this, I want to have the accommodations in writing.

I'm really getting to a point of thinking WHY in the world am I trying so hard to get him into safe K program for just 3 hours a day when it's not even mandatory in our state to go to K. Maybe I should just look into outside socializing options (library, children's museum, gym, etc.) and homeschooling / unschooling and just forget about public school at least for now. Especially since he may be switching schools starting in 1st if our building gets closed and we may be going through all this AGAIN. So if things don't go too well tomorrow, I'll probably just tell them "forget K" ... just give us school speech therapy (so we can keep the IEP alive) and we'll talk again next year.

The meeting is behind us. Thank you all again for the great help and suggestions! We made it through without any emotions getting out of hands and everyone walked out of the meeting fairly happy. I loosened up regarding having the allergies in the IEP but we are getting a lot more detailed Health Plan and will get pretty much all the accommodations I was asking for as long as we have it officially requested by DS's pediatrician or allergist, including either a special ed busing to and from school (due to the cold allergy) or regular busing but the bus would stop in front of our house and wait for us to come out of the house rather than us waiting at the bus stop in the middle of the winter in the cold. Plus getting an assigned seat that would be cleaned properly to avoid exposure to egg residue possibly left over from other kids. So, all in all we did good

Couple things I didn't like ... the school nurse was there too (fine with me) but she kept prodding at me in regards to what reactions DS had in the past and always ended up with "so, you didn't actually have to use the epi-pen" ... when she asked the same thing for the 3rd time it was starting to get to me. The fact we have never actually had to use it is NOT because his allergy wouldn't be severe. It's because we are doing a great job AVOIDING any chance for life threatening reactions! Very strange coming from a NURSE! Does a kid actually have to go into shock for them to understand the dangers?

And a little bit of disconnect I saw in how different people perceive DS ... while one of the therapists and even his teachers are concerned with how much he gets sick that the "academics" standards may be hard to keep up with with in Kindergarten the special ed director said something along the lines of "he'll be one of those kids that will make us look GREAT on standardized testing" ... I'm thinking the second one is more likely. He's already way passed the K standards in most area except for writing and some reading! Being home sick a lot is probably what will keep him from being bored and acting out too much! lol

And just as we thought we had it all figured out, we hit another road block. A week ago DS4.9 was tested for more allergies on top of the ones we already knew about. This time we included environmental and seasonal and what do you know, he tested positive to every single thing they did (trees, grass, dust mites, mold, cats, dogs, etc.) And all of theme big time allergies, some at 4PPP on a 0-4 scale. So we started daily allergy meds to make DS's life more comfortable and then he started to show signs of allergy and exercise induced asthma and THEN to top it off, on Saturday he had two episodes where he basically stopped breathing without any warnings (asthma attacks most likely) so now we have an inhaler from the emergency room until we see the allergist again on Wednesday and he will decide what to do next. It seems the air outside was so saturated with the tree pollen he's so highly allergic that he just went into something very similar to anaphylactic shock. At least we know it's related to his seasonal allergies so shouldn't be an issue all year but it was very scary so now we are to square one in terms of his school health plan. Can't even put him on the school bus the next two weeks since they have no a/c and drive with the windows down plus the bus driver wouldn't be allowed to use his inhaler if needed anyways. And the teacher wouldn't use the inhaler either. She said they would take him to the nurse's office, which in his case might be too late since he went from being 100% fine to not breathing within seconds.

So, back to thinking about homeschooling. Especially since it just dawned on me that even though the boys are 19 months apart, they could be on the same curriculum since the younger one is more advanced (though not cooperating! lol)