IEP Saga continues

I wanted to share each step of this process, including communication between us and the school so that *hopefully* it can be useful to others and allow us to be held accountable and receive suggestions. Given the concerns that were brought to us regarding this process, I reached out to the school with the following email:

Hi XXXXXXX,

I wanted to first thank you for being flexible with the dates of Little Bug's IEP in order to ensure that we have time to review the evaluation results so that the meeting time can be maximized for all parties.

I did have a few questions that I was hoping you would be able to help me with:

1. Given that Little Bug’s IEP is tentatively scheduled for July 2, 2009, I would like to request a list of who would be available to attend the meeting. We want to ensure that he will have a detailed and specific IEP in place prior to the start of the school year. If due to lack of attendance of the interested parties that would not be achievable, we would like to move his evaluations and IEP meeting up with a goal of the first two weeks in June to ensure that we use everyone's time effectively and avoid creating duplicate work for your team.

2. Because Little Bug does have ASD, we would like to request that the district's Autism Specialist be present for both the evaluations as well as the IEP meeting.

3. Finally, I wanted to confirm that you did receive Dr. XXXXX's diagnosis of ASD for Little Bug. If not, I would be happy to fax it to you.

Thank you in advance for your help and continued cooperation.

Sincerely,

Blake

The response simply said that they would have to look into dates and they would get back to us.

Obviously, this is not how we hoped things would be. I had hoped that we wouldn’t have to jump through hoops. I would hope that every child would get a specific IEP in a timely manner without having to go through the process twice, which is what was going to happen.

As I mentioned before, its common in our school district for them to do a generic IEP in the summer and then do the process all over again come September. THAT IS THE DUMBEST AND MOST INEFFECTIVE AND INEFFICIENT WAY TO SET UP A SYSTEM I HAVE EVER HEARD OF! I mean come on- we talk about precious resources in school and a higher demand due to the higher number of children with developmental disabilities. Is this really a way to meet that demand?

But, I am left with- what am I going to do about it to change it? I have to be honest and say I don’t know how to answer that question yet, but I will.