Little Bug's evaluations

They went amazing! The team involved were really personable and took the time to really get to know Little Bug and us. I am sure that this is built in to a certain degree- as it was obvious that they had an interview portion for the parents with a list of questions and then moved on to the evaluations- but they seem to go above an beyond with us. They scheduled our time away from the normal cattle call affair.

For cognitive, they used the Battelle test and Little Bug scored a 95 without hitting a ceiling. He was having trouble sitting, so that made all the tests take longer and they gave us the option of moving on to a new test or hitting a ceiling with him. We chose moving on because he still had fine motor evaluations and it was getting to be nap time.

For gross motor, they cancelled the evaluation based on his performance throughout the day. The PT came by, but stated that because what she had seen him do, she didn't feel an evaluation was necessary. Nick and I agreed as that has never been a concern with our little Houdini.

For Speech, they didn't hit a ceiling and he was performing with some errors into the 42 to 47 month range. She was concerned about the amount of echoing he was doing and also about some of the pronunciations of words. She also said that his utterances weren't long enough and that he wasn't forming functional sentences- more just commenting by placing two words together.

For fine motor, he aced everything at a 4 to 5 year old level except for the writing portion which he did at a 3 year old level. The OT gave us recommendations for activities to better his grip at home.

Recommendations:

The ASD Program director was with us during the interview part and made it clear that she felt an Autism Preschool would be good for Lennon because of the extended day program. She really advocated for class from hell, but we calmly and politely explained that we didn't feel it was structured enough based on our visit and that it appeared to be to made up of a lot of unstructured play time. She thought that we might wasnt to go visit another program. It was interesting that in this discussion, recommendations weren't made by her and the PT based off of the closest school, but which school they felt he would have the best peers. This was different from when the Special Education director came to our house because he stressed closest above all else. I don't think we heard him say "appropriate" without including the phrase "the closest school with"...

speech- one on one speech at school as well as group
OT- available to deal with sensory issues but no individualized therapy.

The SLP and the Special Education teacher felt that Little Bug should be placed in general special education preschool. The teacher felt that he was past a lot of the kids placed in the ASD program and that the regular special education groups would make better peers. We stated that we felt that this would be the appropriate route, however we did not feel that 2 days a week would be consistent enough for him. They said that its normally up to his teacher to make that determination, but that they could ask the director on our behalf if Little Bug would be allowed 4 days. I heard them ask him and his response was- Damn straight he needs 4 days.

Its funny how nothing turned out as badly as we thought it would. Now, Nick and I are going to focus on writing starter IEP goals as well as a positive intervention plan to bring to the IEP meeting. We are hoping to have them done so that our team can review before the meeting and give feedback.

Funny side note, I received my own set of recommendations during the meeting. They continuously asked if Nick and I were educators or therapists, and our answer was no- we read a lot of books and pay attention. The ASD director and I talked about video modeling, ABA, task analysis and she asked me, have you thought about being an educator? You could at least be a consultant to other parents. It was a huge ego boost.

They kept telling us that they were amazed at how far he had come- based off of his report from our Neurologist, his original Vineland, as well as his IFSP from the county. They stated that we must do an amazing job of following through at home and that he was lucky to have us. We said thank you over and over again and were honestly quite surprised. We were expecting the no nonsense abruptness that has been our previous contact with the school district and we treated amazingly well.