Our district is constantly cutting special ed. Whenever they find themselves needing to balance the budget, they cut special ed teachers, and I suspect that the spec. ed directors are actually giving out directives to the schools to reduce the number of kids they evaluate, the number of assessments they give, etc. The school fought me when I asked them to test DD for math fluency, which takes just a few minutes (they were giving her parts of the Woodcock Johnson ANYWAY). They actually sent me a prior written notice stating that it is not necessary to honor this request which was infuriating. They might as well scream out to me "We will do as little as possible and you are a nut!" The special ed directors gave the "Ok" for the school to do this. Then in the IEP eligibility meeting they claimed that DD would be pulled out in a group for writing with 5 or 6 other kids, it would be at an inappropriate time, and it wouldn't do any good, so therefore she's better off without an IEP and the teachers could work with her in the classroom. The teachers agreed. Even though DD wasn't writing at all in class her gifted teacher claimed that a lot of gifted kids are like her and "it always gets better." It was a group of 8 or 9 people vs. us, the parents. I asked if DD could get a para for the parts of the day where she is most off task (because the eval showed her to be very off task) and the spec. ed director said "I wouldn't know." Ummm, what? They didn't have a single suggestion of how they were going to help her other than the math teacher suggesting that he could send her out in the hallway to work by herself. So yeah, I am actually flabbergasted that that the school in the article was talking about ANY special services or a special school, even if they were inappropriate, because I couldn't even get an IEP until I fought them, got an IEE (which confirmed all my concerns), the evaluator negotiated with the spec. ed director, etc. But even after all that, I question how much it actually helps. DD is pulled out for writing but it IS with 5 other kids, and I don't think the teachers have bothered to read her IEP. The other day the teacher sent home a test with a score of 50 percent which was incomplete. DD said that the teacher refused to let her finish it, claiming that she had given DD enough time (she made DD turn it in when the next slowest kid in the class turned it in). It shouldn't be rocket science to figure out that this is inappropriate. And every time I have to send an email asking questions about things like this, I get further and further into the crazy mom zone.
