Well we had our annual meeting at the school yesterday. All in all it was okay. The highlights, the school officially dxed my kid as autistic (aspergers), for qualification purposes. This was not a shock to us, and really the only way he gets help through the school. We recorded the meeting. They about freaked when we asked, but my hubby is a kind nice guy. At least one of the therapist smiled and nodded her head like, yes you are making the right choice. It does seem like they are trying to work with us. So the big changes, no reading help, no academic help at all, but he will have a teacher come in daily to check his folders and make sure it all gets emptied out and reloaded appropriatly. He will continue with speech services. There was a huge screw up a few weeks ago by the speech teacher, but it turns out to be a blessing i think. Bascially he was talking, but not communicating and no one seemed to understand what he was trying to say, so he missed out on a huge party. It finally dawned on the speech teacher that sort of thing happens to him a lot. So she is really going to work on social stories and trying to figure out the right way to communicate. Although we have been saying this for years, he tests well, he just can't apply it.

Anyway, it is okay. Hard long day and meeting. It was just a little over 3 hours. My hubby took off work to come to the meeting.

the only funny thing, the psych made a big deal twice in her write up about dad not being around. I guess andrew mentioned that he likes his dad, but he works a lot. And he does, but he does come home almost every night..LOL. And usually by 7. But Andrew does spend twice as much time with me. And then he was asked to draw a family picture and he left his dad out of it..ROFL. This concerned the psych a little. When I asked andrew about it at home he said, "well duh we were playing guitar hero and there are only 4 remotes." Too funny, so another one of those communication issues that they seem to not quite get.

We will see how it goes. The thing that I find hardest is they have a lot of he should be doing this, and next year this, but they don't seem so good with the steps to that. Yes he needs to be independent, but you can't just so okay kid from now on, go! He has to be walked hand in hand for awhile and then side by side and then a little behind him. This is common sense to me, but others just don't seem to see that pattern.

By Cat on Thursday, November 20, 2008 - 10:53 am:

Three hours??? The longest meeting we've ever had was about an hour and a half, maybe two. WOW!!! Good for you for recording it. Maybe I should start doing that. :p Sounds like a good meeting, for the most part. I hope things work out. Too funny about the picture and the psych being concerned about dad. They have to realize these kid's brains work different than ours. You can't just take what they say at face value--you have to really find out what they mean.

By Kaye on Friday, November 21, 2008 - 10:08 pm:

I have to say the best part about recording it is how we did it. We had a meeting to discuss his testing, which we did unrecorded. We basically read and talk about the results. But when it was time for the official "ard" which is what determines placement, we said oh wait we would like to record this. So they had already let down their guard a bit. If you pull out a recorder right away they start not happy. So this just worked really well. And our issues last year ran into what was said and what was written did not match.