I’ve almost caught up to the present!  Last Friday we had another meeting.  This was to rewrite Emma’s goals.  Because, per my advocate’s words, the old ones were “crap”.  Nicely said.  Brett and I let her do her thing and she came up with very specific goals for Emma.  And a lot more than the few that Emma had.  When she wrote these goals for Emma, she reviewed the Arizona Early Learning Standards.  And she made it very clear that these goals needed to be reached using ABA principles, with staff trained in ABA and PBIS using multi sensory teaching strategies.  What, you don’t know all of these acronyms?  It’s okay…neither do I.  I’m learning, slowly but surely.

Because my advocate rocks, all of Emma’s new goals were accepted, with some tweaking of wordage here and there.  And after about 1 ½ hours of running around the subject, we finally started talking about placement.  Where will Emma be next year?  As you can imagine, the district and my family have very different ideas of what is best for Emma.  It’s the district’s job to tell us why their own self-contained program will work just fine for Emma.  It’s our job to tell them why it won’t be good enough.  They’ve screwed up FAPE for her (Free And Public Education) and we’ve lost our faith in them.  Obviously more was said.  Kristina went over lots of data to tell them why their program wouldn’t work, and why this (predetermined, by Kristina and Brett and myself) private school would be the best placement.  Of course district doesn’t want to hear that.

Here’s where we stand:  We’re waiting to get another meeting to (hopefully) conclude this.  We have provided our Parent Input (again, something Kristina wrote up beautifully).  And, by the way, Kristina was able to subtly slide into this Parent Input the “unwarranted and false evaluation by the principal” that I received.  I told you, she’s good.  I think the district would be stupid to fight with us on this.  Especially with that little bombshell.  However, they could.  We will meet.  District will bring in two employees who have visited the private school we’ve chosen.  We will bring in the director of the private school we’ve chosen.  And we will hash this out, hopefully without going to mediation or due process.  But if they push us there, then we’ll fight with everything we have.

And….the biggest and best news…Emma is at this new school as I type as a shadow student for a day.  This is to make sure that this school is the best fit for Emma.  Can I just tell you how excited Emma was today to try a new school?  She immediately made a new friend and practically ran to the gymnasium without giving me a hug or kiss.  She couldn’t wait to start her day at this new school!!  This goes to show that Emma has a passion to learn.  She loves school.  She just needs to be in the right placement.

Cabrillo National Monument at Point Loma

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