A long rant...and thanks to Dad, auditory mom, and socks

It shouldn’t be this hard….

My non-LD child, but on an IEP because of mental health issues, quit doing ALL in-school work three weeks ago. At least one regular ed teacher told his spec ed teacher right away. The regular ed teacher was told not to worry about it if son wasn’t failing. No one bothered to tell me. Thursday this teacher called me because son was now failing. Coincidentally, another caring teacher called me right afterwards to tell me the same thing. We need to find out why son shut down at school and I also felt I needed to get him somewhat caught up on work. To the work end, I called the Assistant Principal (AP) and asked for a complete list of missed work. AP said I should leave voicemail messages for all seven regular ed teachers and hope they were picked up. He then suggested I e-mail the teachers. We left it that he would e-mail them with the requirement to get the list (and anything necessary to complete the list—ie books, movies, material) to him by 7:30 AM today. This was at 10:00 AM so the teachers had less than 24 hours. I feel badly about this but the whole school was leaving this morning on a field trip and son needs this weekend to work on stuff. Son and I arrive at 7:30. AP gets in 15 minutes later. He had forgotten to e-mail teachers—nothing was ready. He said he’d do it later. I said we’d wait. He said he might not get to it. I asked if he had gotten my notice of intent to tape meetings (THANKS DAD) and whipped out the recorder. He said he’d do it right away. Five minutes later he’s back with one assignment each from two classes, not the two that started the whole thing! He said he had talked to son’s “core” teachers and this was what needed to be done. I asked what the first period teacher had said—low and behold, he’d missed him, he’d be right back. What did the second period teacher say, gosh she’d been missed to, he’s be right back. Etc, Etc, Etc. Turns out the AP had only talked to two the first swipe though and even those he needed to go back to as he had only picked up the current assignment, not all the back ones.

Then I reminded him that he said he’d have copies of the proposed IEP (THANKS AUDIORY MOM) and district polices ready for me today so I could review them before our 30 minute IEP meeting next Friday. He hadn’t had time to get them. I told him I’d wait. He then told me the policies were linked to the district web-site—just look that up tonight. I asked him to pull up the web site to confirm that—we found no such link. We ended up waiting for the district office to fax over a copy of the policies but the proposed IEP was a washout as it isn’t written yet.

I then thanked him for confiming via e-mail that we could schedule as many 30 minute IEP meetings as the team needed (THANKS SOCKS). He said he may have been mistaken, some of the team won’t be available after June 4th so we’d have to wrap it up next Friday. I told him I needed at least 90 minutes. He said he’d reschedule.

Aaaaaarrrrrrggggghhhh…..

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