Hopefully it all works out...
First, I am EXTREMELY glad I brought an advocate with me. While I don't think the school would have tried anything without her there, I realized how much having someone that knows the laws and guidelines helps.
We got the school to agree to new speech and occupational evaluations. We never had real ones to begin with, they took an interview with me to make their determinations without evaluating him.
They do not want to switch him to a full day of school, despite our state guidelines saying he should have 25 hrs a week. We are going to re-examine the issue in December when we meet to go over the ST and OT evals.
I was shocked to find out that they are literally having ZERO behavior problems with D. I had been told that he had problems with transition. Well, as it turns out, they didn't mean the every day transitions in class, but the big transition to returning to school. So they will not be doing a BIP or FBA for him.
I also had been told that he was only getting ABA discrete trials for 10-20 min every few days. I had assumed that this was their ABA program. I was delighted to find out (this was not the case last year) that his current teachers whole curriculum is ABA based.
We did not re-write his EXTREMELY out of date IEP goals, but will once we have the evaluations in December.
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We also spoke about the potty training issue. The advocate suggested they keep a record of what happens before his accidents to figure out why he's having them. His teacher said she wanted to try a method that they use when all else fails of every time he had an accident to pull his pants up and down 10 times. I wasn't very happy with this idea, which is when the advocate chimed in.
I still really feel like the teacher doesn't think he has autism at all. She was kind of hinting at it. By the fact that he'll go up to others and ask if they want to play (which is usually met with a no apparently), and that he has good eye contact, and that he will go up to people and say "Hi [insert name]." (These were all examples she gave in the meeting.
She also gave me yet another updated ABLLS sheet. So far in a month and a half, she has had to come up with new ABLLS goals 4 times. So he's seeing progress, but I'm really hoping to see even more.
(Sorry for the long post.)
Sounds like a plan! Also sounds like you have a GOOD advocate. Congratulations on finding someone who can really help.
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