This was truly the theme song for my day. A bit of bad; a bit of good; and a heaping dose of ugly. First, the bad…

My beloved cell phone (palm pilot) is apparently so old that they no longer make accessories for it. I’m discovering this is not an uncommon occurrence in the cell phone world. So, because the charger has quit working (except when held steady in the car), I have less than a battery’s worth of time to figure out what my next move is.

Now, on to the ugly…

We had an IEP meeting today. Yes, while the rest of the world has “IEP season” in that there’s a rush right before school is out to get their IEPs done, we have ours over the summer! And, despite my insisting otherwise, we have marathon sessions. Today’s was 4.75 hours (from 10 am to nearly 3 pm with no break for lunch, of course). But that was not the ugly part.

The ugly part was the totally obvious lack of caring about my child in any way shape or form that occurred. I am so over these people! The only person I’ve ever been more “over” is my ex-husband! Now that we are in federal appeal of our incredibly ludicrous due process hearing, we get an IEP team full of attorneys and administrators. Out of the twelve school personnel in the room, only 5 had ever met LuLu and only one had spent more than an hour with her. And the group had an obvious agenda…to make sure that their original labeling of my child as a “behavior disorder” still stands. Admitting less would be admitting that they had previously been wrong.

So, my daughter remains labeled as emotional/behavioral disordered, not autism and not OHI. Never mind that we spent the first 4 hours of our 4.75 hour meeting going over the latest school psychological evaluation where the psychologist, after spending 9 sessions with LuLu has found her to present “on the autism spectrum”. The school will acknowledge that we have diagnoses of autism, Tourettes, ADHD and others…not to mention trauma. What they won’t (can’t, refuse, don’t want to) see is that behaviors aren’t the problem…it’s what is causing the behaviors that is. And that they way to help my child academically is by addressing her many deficits one-by-one as thoroughly as possible and “lessening the issues in her bucket”.

It is so much easier if you can just label neurologically impaired children as “bad” and send them off to a separate school together, never addressing their disorders, giving them complicated point systems that they can either not understand or become highly frustrated with, and then dragging them down the hall to the isolation room when they have behaviors that may actually be manifestations of their disorders. It requires so much less understanding of each child’s individual needs. It gets them out of sight.

For the last 16 months our family has been embroiled in a battle for what we thought was the education my daughter needed. We believed (and even Super Dad still believed this to a certain extent today) that someone in the system cared about LuLu and truly wants her to receive an education. But there’s no evidence anywhere to back that belief. Only old stereotypical beliefs that die hard. I grew up loving teachers; so much so that I studied to be one. I have always believed that they were underpaid and overworked and that they must have the patience of Job to deal with the issues they deal with. Several of my friends are teachers or parapros, and I know them to be loving, caring champions of children.

But there’s an ugly underbelly to public education…and that’s administrators. I’m sorry to say that protecting the school system’s purse strings might be the stated goal; but to protect their own fiefdoms and “win” at all cost is more likely the real goal. How else do you justify 12 school staff in an IEP meeting for nearly 5 hours repeatedly (this is not the first marathon IEP meeting we’ve had.)? How can anyone possibly explain the cost of a nearly 2-year court case and endless IEP meetings and evaluations to the taxpayers? I’m disgusted as LuLu’s mom; but even more so as a taxpayer in this county.

I’ve painted with a broad brush and suspect that there are readers out there who are administrators. Many are probably very loving, caring and child-centered. I just haven’t met those in the last 16 months. Ok, I’ll partially take that back…as the school psychologist who evaluated LuLu truly attempted to do a thorough, accurate and caring job. She stated unequivocally that she found LuLu to “present as autistic”. Yet she likes her job. So what she had to say was discounted by those in charge and versed in state regulations and procedures and we moved on.

It was all incredibly ugly.

So, let’s talk about the good…

After dinner out (my girls deserved that for spending their day cooped up together), LuLu and I headed to the pool. I asked her if I needed to get into the pool and she said I could just read and she would “practice” playing with other children. She told me she’s decided to start practicing how to play with others, especially since the summer camp she has coming up is going to be a social camp to work on friend-making skills.

So, much to my delight, I watched my child mirror play with a group of boys about her same age or slightly younger. They splashed each other and jumped, yelled and played. She imitated them and engaged them some. Girls her own age don’t tolerate how far behind socially she is very well; but this group of rowdy boys did this just fine. When she tired of this, she started talking with a woman and her daughter who was about LuLu’s age. Most times she actually ends up talking 100% of the time to the mother and sometimes becoming pretty controlling of the conversation. This time, the mom suggested ways for the girls to interact and LuLu did.

It was in watching this that I realized how much progress she’s making. Learning how to socially interact step by step by step is tedious and often painful. Learning it at age 10, when all others have learned at age 2-3, can be sheer torture and a real set-up for rejection. But even when a very small girl took one of LuLu’s toys and I was bracing for trouble, she very appropriately and calmly asked for it back. She’s serious about “practicing” her social skills.

It was good to end the day this way…a refocusing on what (and who) is important.