Lean Production: Inside the war on public education

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65. She is aware of the law.

I've heard her tell the administrative representative at the IEP meeting that exact thing; many times.

I understand your tendency to tell us: "shame on you", but there are a lot of extenuating circumstances. The first of which is that she has a new teacher this year. They were doing OK until about a week before Christmas break. We had an outside consultant (behavior analyst) evaluate her program and make recommendations. The analyst did a good job and everyone seemed to be on-board with the recommendations. Then 2 days before Christmas break began; one of the assistant principals called and insisted that we come get her. He was apparently unaware of what was going on with the new behavior interventions.

We are willing to cut them some slack because they have an entirely new administrative staff because the previous group was fired at the end of the last school year.

My daughter will return to school next week, but it's ridiculous that they can't manage things better than that. There's a lot of turmoil in the school district anyway because they were taken over by the state 2 years ago because of their fiscal irresponsibility. Yeah, we called the state.

The difference between a wheelchair bound student and a self-injurious child are many. We send her to school and she has a replacement para or classroom teacher and they don't know how to deal with her; we have a bruised up little girl for a week or more. If they would tell us when they are using replacements; we may choose to keep her at home on those days. You can imagine their response when we ask them to give us a heads up... Or I can just tell you; they don't answer to us.

Since she is non-verbal; we have no idea what happened when she came home with bruises all over her face, and we can't get an honest, consistent story from the school. They have secret meetings to try and control the flow of the meetings.

There is an 'app' known as proloquo2go which we have installed on an iPhone (with no service) that we refer to as her 'device'. I have taught her to communicate her wants (I.e. "I want to watch TV", "I want something to eat", I need someone to peel my orange" etc). We set her up with it over Christmas break last year after it was recommended by Easter seals. The speech path at the school decided not to use it, Easter seals stopped coming to the school, and we found out at the end of the year; it was because she (the speech path) didn't know how to use it and wasn't going to use it until she had training on it. She was replaced at the school also.

So, after a year of her carrying around a communication device; she only uses it to communicate at home and only the phrases that either I taught her, or she figured out herself.

The classroom teacher really likes her and is a well qualified special education teacher. We had a meeting scheduled the day the principal called and my wife is insisting that the meeting be held before we send her back to school.

It's a constant struggle, but we are still trying to work with this new group before we go to due process. It's just very frustrating and time consuming.