We had our triennial IEP meeting for DS10 today, and the consensus is that his IEP can be dropped and the tiny remaining bit of services he is getting can be moved into his ALP. He has made such amazing progress with his behavior that nobody feels he meets the criteria for IEP anymore, although obviously he will always have Asperger's. It just doesn't interfere with his education now.
On the other side, he advocated for himself to get more advancement to middle school classes, and we are trying to figure out the options to make that happen. He told the counselor that he wants to stay at the middle school until lunch because the whole morning bores him out of his gourd. His words.
Right now, he starts the day in 7th grade math and then comes back to his 5th grade class for the rest of the day. Morning is reading, writing and social studies.
The options are now either to find a way to get him reading, writing and social studies (and of course the math he already has) at the middle school and not miss the parts of 5th that he likes, or to skip him totally into 6th (with his 7th math).
Nobody, including DS, wants him to skip totally right this instant and leave all the people in elementary that he's grown up with. He says, "no, I'm not ready to say goodbye here yet, that's for my 5th grade graduation!" I don't want him to lose the teacher he's waited so long for, and I don't want to jump straight into a new support team partway into a year. I would like to gear up for skipping some of middle school.
So we're all working frantically to figure something out -- they don't necessarily want to rush, but the new quarter starts next week, so it's a good transition point if we can make it work.
I think I have a solution worked out, where he would take reading and writing and social studies in the morning at the middle school, have half an hour of art (with the same art teacher but 6th instead of 5th),go to lunch with his 5th class, then "specials" (PE, Art, Computers, etc., alternating) with 5th, go to 7th math -- different class, same teacher -- and back to 5th for science at the end of the day. Whew! On the other hand, there are always factors that somebody doesn't think of -- our counselor had a schedule figured out going into this meeting today, but then the MS counselor showed her something about the schedule at the MS that wasn't obvious from looking at the blocks of time, and that flew out the window. Another possibility looks good on paper but the class in question is too big and rather a delicate balance and the math teacher doesn't want to move him into that situation. So I hope my solution on paper works as well in life!
