Positive IEP for the 2012/13 school year!

On Tuesday we attended the rescheduled IEP meeting for our son Conner at school after the original meeting was cancelled due to a lack of power due to the recent tornado. Because of the short notice, our advocate and case worker could not attend, we only found out late Friday. But overall we are happy with the outcome of the meeting, we feared that Conner would lose his services as he is now considered ineligible for services under his development delay IEP. But instead he was switched to an autism IEP which will mean he gets to keep his current services plus start some new services. Suffice to say this is a great weight off our shoulders.

Conner will be able to keep his speech therapy twice weekly for 20 minutes and his weekly 20 minute counseling sessions, in addition to that he’ll get daily 30 minutes one on one time to help him with his math, which is Conner’s big problem area. To walk away from the meeting feeling happy with the situation was a great bonus as we were expecting to have to fight tooth and nail for Conner to keep his services.

The meeting was well attended, his teacher, special ed teacher, school speech pathologist, social worker, psychologist, nurse and counselor and everyone was making positive noises about Conner, telling us how he is unrecognizable from when he joined the school at Kindergarten level. Literally everyone knows Conner at school, which means that he can not get away with anything in school without us finding out, annoying for him but a blessing for us. I have noticed a big improvement in Conner’s general sociability, he actually approached a couple of kids in our apartment complex and joined in with what they were playing and not dictating like he normally does, seeing this sort of behavior really makes us happy!

A lot of the credit for this change in school and out of school is the work that Miss Kaitlin, a psychology student working with SCMHCC, is doing with him, everyone at school has said that there is a marked improvement in Conner in the last eight weeks, which ties in perfectly with the time that Miss Kaitlin started working with him, we really can’t thank her enough for the work she has done with Conner!

After three years of having to fight for every service Conner has received, we are ecstatic that Conner has been given an improved services package without us having to get into peoples’ faces to get those services for him, as always we’ll do everything we can to give Conner the best chance of succeeding in the future!

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