Aspie Dad

I neglected to do this when it occured — I apologize…

We had the first meeting for Aspie Boy’s IEP back on May 18th and we left with things still unresolved. The institutional position was that he needed to either move on to a lower functioning program or get mainstreamed in Kindergarten next fall.

Aspie Mom (yes, it’s true…) and I agreed immediately that ‘they’ [them!] had forgotten that Aspie Boy missed the birthday cutoff by three weeks [edit: the cutoff to go to Kindergarten for 2006-07]. He is so large for being four and a half (height or weight is +3Σ/99 percentile; height/weight is 50 percentile) that everyone thinks he is six. Obviously this is also often a problem with the school personnel thinking he is regressing or lower functioning.

So we brought this up outside the meeting and within a day had agreement that he is doing fine and should stay just where he is for next year. (’Oh wait! He’s only FOUR! (nervous laughter) OH, oh. Umm, yes. Let’s not go with that plan, we’ll amend.’) If things continue as they have been, Aspie Boy should enter Kindergarten along with everyone else in a year [edit: during the 2007-08 school year]. Yea!

Otherwise we were going to take him out of the program because we’re trying to get him to ‘model up, not down’ [edit: and the program change would be contrary to those objectives].

I can only think of how different things would have been for me 40 years ago if there had been this kind of attention paid to what was going on. Que sera.

So despite what I/we suspect is some institutional pressure to move kids ‘out’, we’ve escaped the trend. For now at least.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 5th, 2006 at 9:02 pm and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.