Attorney Journey Part 2
I guess when I posted the last time I didn’t realize it was Friday and I wouldn’t be posting on the weekend! However, I will continue with the story now that it’s Monday. During the preparatory stage, the attorney was scouring all of the documents. I was spending a lot of time at the computer transcribing meetings, and we had hired a behavior expert to provide an FBA (Functional Behavior Analysis) for Emma, something that had never been done in the public school. This guys is the best in the business and I was confident he’d find what the attorney had suspected. Mind you, we’ve never met the attorney. But I suppose when you read 300+ pages about a student, you get a feel for who they are!
I will say that from the time we signed the contract and she received our documents to the date that we actually filed (“we” meaning the attorney) was about 1 month. It moved pretty quickly. Fortunately. Because I was a big ball of stress during this whole time. It was surreal.
I had hoped, as most do, that this would be resolved out of court. However, when you file with the court, you get a court date. Automatically. And here (perhaps it’s different where you are?) your court date is about 9 weeks out from the date you file. Sure enough we had a court date for early November. To have that on your calendar “Court Date” is a little freaky. We hoped, again, that we wouldn’t need the court, and we could settle it outside. Something that we did, which is common, is we waived any right for mediation. I can’t remember the exact term, but basically, we didn’t want to set up another meeting that would, in essence, become a glorified IEP where we plead our case. Again.
The best news came a day before my birthday. They wanted to settle out of court. And we would proceed with negotiating the settlement. I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday gift! I have to tell you, negotiating a settlement is like negotiating buying a house. Except it’s not fun. It’s more stressful, and you’re not getting a house at the end. But the back and forth is the same. And you hope that they get their head outta their ass and do the right thing. But that’s usually asking too much. We were just happy to be working towards a settlement.
In the meantime, Emma had started at the new school. She actually started back up just shy of 3 weeks post surgery. Amazing. She was adamant about going back to school if it was going to be the new school. And guess what. She was doing well. And she was happy. And learning. Imagine that. You can read about her first few days at the new school here.
I’ll finish our Attorney Journey…it gets good!
