Am I correct in thinking this is totally inappropriate? An OT would work on the handwriting/fine motor issues, right?
An OT is the professional who would work on handwriting - but one thing that would be helpful before going into this meeting is to have an idea what goals are attainable with handwriting, and that's an issue that might need input from a different type of professional. For example, our ds' DCD diagnosis came from a neuropsych, and her evaluation showed that developing automaticity was the root issue for ds, which in turn impacted his fine motor abilities. Her recommendation was to teach ds how to print so that he knew how to form letters, work with OT to learn correct pencil grip and posture... and then to move on to AT. If your ds' school is ready to drop the OT, you need answers to the question: will further OT generate further improvements in handwriting/motor skills. And it's possible the answer will be no. It's also possible the answer from school will be he's met the IEP goals and you could find a private professional who will work further with him - we had to use private OT because in spite of our ds' challenges he didn't meet our school district's criteria for OT. It was worth it for what he gained, but otoh it the gains were in posture, pencil grip, limiting wrist pain and appropriate pencil pressure when writing. OT was not able to give him functional handwriting.
Even his written experssion is going backwards badly. He was doing nicely in first grade when it came to writing paragraphs with punctuation, spaces, main ideas and details, etc. They appear to still be working on that two years later and his writing is now worse!
It's possible he's not making gains in written expression because he's relying on handwriting. It's also possible that he's got additional challenges with written expression (expressing his thoughts, organizing them, etc) that haven't been obvious up to this point because the work hasn't been as challenging, or that have been masked by his handwriting challenges. If he's struggling with handwriting still, he should be scribing or keyboarding for assignments that are anything other than specifically handwriting practice or short short answer questions. You might still see issues with written expression - but that would at least let you know there was more to the issue than handwriting.
My options seem to be
1) give up at least the rest of the year, homeschool, and try to work with him myself, getting private therapies.
2) request something like mediation and try to convince or force people they should work with him when they clearly don't want to.
We had to go the private therapy route for OT, but our district has extremely low bars to qualify for services. You've at least already qualified for OT, so you are in a position to request it continue if there's a reasonable expectation for goals. I expect that's the sticky part at this point: are the goals you're asking for attainable, and are they goals within what is normally provided by SPED in your school district? Please note I'm not saying a school district can just decide they don't want to provide handwriting remediation, what I meant by what is normally provided is what's within normal level of remediation provided - there is most likely some guideline within the school district of what level of functioning is adequate and services aren't provided to get above that level.
I'm not sure you're at the level of needing mediation yet until you've determined what the potential for handwriting remediation is, and also because the OT has begun to work on AT with your ds. Did you have recommendations for AT and the future needs for AT from your ds' diagnostic eval? Was that eval through the school or private? If it was private and it's been awhile, it might be helpful to meet with the private evaluator for a brief chat to discuss what's been tried, where ds is at etc to see if he/she has recommendations on the path forward for OT/AT etc.
This also may not sound encouraging, and I have no idea if your ds' DCD will play out the way my ds' has (DCD is so different in how it impacts individuals), but we focused on AT and let handwriting go, and that was really the best thing for ds in many respects. For instance, he had to learn cursive at school and he did - he had relatively great looking cursive while he was working on it in school - but after one summer off he forgot it - all of it. Today, he knows how to write his name in cursive, but even that, he has to practice before he writes it. He just had to sign a form for school this week and he had to cross out his first attempt at writing his name because he didn't spell it correctly. He developed legible printing after he worked with an OT, but he lost that legibility not too long after stopping working with her. He does use handwriting for math and some of his science labs... and there are times when even he can't read what he wrote. When he uses handwriting, even if it's legible, it's slow. Incredibly slow compared to age and grade peers. And of course, he's thinking about how to write letters and numbers, not thinking about what's going into what he's writing or spelling or punctuation etc. While it might seem like it would have been nice to have had OT to keep working on his handwriting past the year he was in OT, it wouldn't have mattered. There was a big limitation from the DCD on the gains he was going to make, and moving to AT quickly was really important.
I hope that your "conciliation conference" goes well - we had a really rough experience with our public school in elementary. It's totally exhausting to feel like the school is more invested in a fight than in partnering to help the student. I hope that's not where you land.
Best wishes,
polarbear
