I have great irony in my life. Yesterday was a terrific day for LuLu. She did awesome at her school work. We’ve been tackling reading fables and answering questions about the morals and lessons learned. One of her areas of weakness is dissecting a story and being able to retell it, as well as making any inferences about it. This unit on fables is hitting these areas hard. We did a Venn diagram of the fable, and answered several questions causing her to digest information and give her opinion. It was tough!

In math, she sped through... more

Today, both sides have rested on this round of our due process hearing...

So now we wait...

And I get to apply my newly obtained knowledge of procedural safeguards and due process hearings in many ways...

More on that later...

But for now...we DANCE!

Here I am, sling in hand – hoping that one stone in one shot will do the trick. It’s funny that I should find an article in this week’s Time Magazine that refers to due process hearings as “David and Goliath situations”. Because that was just the imagery I had as I traveled into court for day # 12 today. We’ve had court every day this week, and supposedly tomorrow will be the last day….for this round.

Then the judge hands down a decision. And each party decided whether to accept or appeal... more

And then it hit me that perhaps the reason the school is fighting this isn't about LuLu, or us, or about making us go away, or even about the cost of educating such a complex disordered child. This could be about egos. Professionals egos. My daughter's complex problems are more than they can figure out, more than they can "solve" with their typical approaches. And I am not the "typical" parent either -- in that I come with my own research and ideas in hand, and perhaps don't defer to their "wisdom" as much as they would like.

I heard it this weekend as I listened to... more

Our battle with the school district has entered the realm of utterly ridiculous. Today I received a nearly 50-page IEP concocted last week from a meeting that we did not attend. The meeting was held, at our request, to go over the MANY evaluations LuLu has received since we began this process of "due process" and requested evaluations at the IEP that started the whole melee last February.

We did not attend the IEP meeting BECAUSE the IEP team refused to invite the speech therapist who had evaluated our daughter or the independent neuropsychologist, who the school system... more

I feel like I've been living in an alternative universe...the universe of a due process hearing courtroom. It has been extremely frustrating, tiring, exciting, boring, aggravating, interesting, curious, odd, unbelievable and most of all overwhelming. It will be fodder for this blog for years to come.

What I truly thought would be a 1-2 day process has now gone on for four days, with five (count 'em...five) more court dates scheduled. Most people I tell that to are astonished. I am as well!

People then inevitably asked me "So how is it going?" I... more

Well...gang...this is it. Tomorrow I head into what is predicted to be 3-4 full days of court for LuLu's due process hearing. Not really the way I wanted to spend the rest of this week. But it will be nice not to have these proceedings hanging over our heads any longer.

Yesterday was spent organizing and re-organizing my files, calling everyone on the planet to testify, and figuring out what we need to settle, should the school decide to come to their senses today or during the hearing.

In many ways it's been a blessing that this has drug on like it has.... more

Do you remember Mr. Toad's Wild Ride? The one at Disney World? The one where you crash into a train and go to hell? (Not too politically correct these days, but a fun little ride.) Well, this is a bit what it feels like to go to due process, so far.

In the overall scheme of things it's not as bad as a mammogram but worse than a root canal. (I judge all painful experiences by medical procedures.) Except it seems to go on MUCH longer than both.

Yesterday we did 8 hours and are scheduled for up to THREE MORE 8-hour days. The problem is in the scheduling.... more

I don't know, but I'm about to. Tomorrow at 9 am is our due process hearing. I spent the afternoon at the attorney's hammering out a settlement we proposed to the school, where basically we asked for everything we wanted (and all the attorneys fees, therapy fees, and evaluation fees). We didn't hear back, but both the attorney and my husband think the school will show up at the hearing tomorrow ready to settle.

I, having a healthy dose of skepticism (and probably secondary traumatic stress - see my last blog), think the school system totally plans on letting this hearing go forth. Will we win? Depends on who you ask. Our attorney calls my witnesses "awesome" and says our case... more

Yesterday was a first in my life -- I was served with a subpoena. Now I know others have professions in which this happens all the time. I guess in my "new" profession of ADVOCACY MOM it was bound to happen to me, too.

(Isn't subpoena a funny word -- it's the kinda thing you'd see on the national spelling bee and no matter how many times I spell it correctly, it still bugs me...but I digress...)

The school system expects both hubby and me to be there next Wednesday to testify in the due process hearing and complaint we filed in February. I hope they don't expect us to testify "against" ourselves, because that's unlikely to happen!!

There isn't... more