Are you ready for your child's IEP Meeting?
To help you through the process I am offering this area of the blog for tips, strategies and even a few alerts to be familiar with, prior to your IEP Meeting.
Parents: Please feel free to keep us posted on your school districts newest strategies for denying students appropriate placement, support services, etc. Please also indicate the school district, whenever possible, so that parents in that particular town can be prepared.
To the attorneys and advocates that are following my blog -- as always, feel free to interject your comments!
Thanks!
Kathi
Friday, March 20, 2009
IEP Preparation
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10 comments:
I hear a lot of Special Needs students in the Cherry Hill School District are being restrained. It is important that professionals recognize the signs that occur prior to a child going into a complete meltdown. If professionals learn the signs and appropriate interventions they can in turn prevent Meltdowns that can be devastating to students. Students want this help. Parents can help professionals recognize the early signs.
Kathi,
I am not on your list anymore for Handle With Care but I got the new email about Cherry Hill budget. What happened to the sign up link? I know 2 people that want to be on your list but could not find the link to sign up.
Thanks for all you do.
I will add to this post after my IEP meeting.
I don't know what happened to that sign up link! I will have to look into that.
I had to sort through 368 email addresses to figure out who was from Cherry Hill and who was a reader from another town! Modern technology! It is possible that you were transferred to the Cherry Hill Only list by accident.
In the meantime, have the 2 people you know that want to be on the list email me at kathimagee@verizon.net
Please ask them to indicate if they want to be on the Handle With Care email list or just the list for Cherry Hill parents.
Thanks,
Kathi
Watch out for that assistant thing again. They keep saying "assistance" and claiming that it is built in to the program. I need a real physical person trained to work with my child. And if they get rid of all these assistants, who will assist? "Assistance" could mean a janitor for crying out loud.
The assistance matter will be critical this year. IF the county superintendent intended to eliminate all non-mandated educational assistants, there will not be, what the district has called, "access aides." The IEP will have to say educational assistant, or your child will not have assistance from anyone but the teacher or perhaps a therapist when she visits a classroom.
OT & PT - Word is that therapists have been advised to deliver therapy in the classroom only. No pull-outs for OT and PT. The have also been advised to "fade" services. That is to say if your child had 4 OT sessions a week, go down to 3 next year, 2 the following. The administration is concerned children are getting dependent on their therapy. Note to admin . . . therapy is for teaching independence. It does not cause dependence.
For all the parents whose children are in 2nd grade co-teaching inclusion at Kingston, Knight and Stockton, beware also. The district is not adding co-teaching classes for 3rd grade. The district only mentions "Maintaining inclusion (co-teaching) model." I would think that if they were growing this model at the 3 schools as they had promised to do, it would say something about adding 3 co-teaching classes.
Don't be fooled by Social Skills Programs that are for kids who need social skills, such as the Interactive Kids Lunch Bunch Program. Do not go for this, it is useless. Kids learn Social Skills in Programs that mimc natural environments where kids in a reverse inclusion setting, learn about the latest trends, and "stuff" that is appropriate for their age. Manners and such are important, parents can teach that with social stories and such, but to learn to interact with others, kids also need to learn about what typical kids are into (one example: ICarly)
Be careful of the restraining issue. I believe Cherry Hill is going down the road of bypassing the teacher training needed to prevent a crisis situation and just teaching their staff CPI Crisis training. Cheaper in the long run. Training is provided by Cherry Hill staff. All they will need to do is provide the parent with a written report that states "the child was becoming a danger to himself or the people around him". Once they've sent home a report, they've covered their butts legally. It's the way Mrs. Franklin thinks..........
I've also heard they are cutting OT & PT services.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
This is very important information and I applaud you (and even if it is hard) for keeping parents informed on how to be advocates for their children.
Stockton does use the janitor to assist at lunch!
At Stockton - it's actually a Custodian not a janitor, and guess what, the Custodians are also on the Budget Cut mandates from County.
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