After two-and-a-half hours, the IEP team had finally made it through all the triennial evaluations. It was clear we wouldn’t have time to finish. To my relief, we had not discussed the alternative placement in Pleasanton. For 30 minutes the team struggled to find a date for the follow-up meeting. They finally settled on January 29^th, during the school day. The principal requested that one of the case managers schedule another classroom visit for me during the intervening three weeks.

It was clear that the team considered the transfer to Pleasanton to be a foregone conclusion. I suspect some of them were annoyed they had to wait three weeks to hand Katie off and wrap everything up. I, in contrast, was not.

The following week I read and re-read all the various reports. Katie was making excellent progress in so many areas. It seemed ridiculous to move her. But the report I kept coming back to was the behavior report. There had been some improvement since the beginning of the school year, but overall her behavior was highly variable. The truth about the program that I could not ignore was that despite its successes, this team could not seem to solve Katie’s behavioral issues. I suspected this was in part due to unmet sensory needs and in part due to a lack of training and experience with autism.

As a wise friend had said to me many times regarding my ex-husband’s drinking: you don’t have to like a crappy situation in order to accept it. I had to accept that my school district simply could not (or would not) deal with this issue. It sucked, but refusing to accept reality wasn’t going to change it.

I stared at the behavior report for two days. If they hadn’t figured it out in five months, they probably never would. But accepting this fact still didn’t make me like the alternative.

The case manager never set up the second classroom visit. The updated behavior report never arrived.

Katie’s ninth birthday fell a few days before the scheduled IEP meeting. She was excited to have not one but three parties to celebrate. The first party was at school. The night before we made a big batch of delicious gluten- and dairy-free cupcakes. Katie’s favorite: chocolate with chocolate frosting. The morning of her birthday she agonized over what to wear for her party. The pants I had picked out simply would not do. She opted for a skirt with tights and her well-worn boots that we had retired the week before.

It was her birthday, so I didn’t fight it even though it was raining. She had been in a strange mood since the previous morning. Laughing one minute and then weepy the next. She could barely sit she was so excited about the cupcakes and the party.

I spent the day working and buying a few last minute gifts—that I then had to wrap. The principal called as I was heading back to school. He said that Katie had washed her hands after painting and “instead of heading back to her desk as she was supposed to do, she snuck up behind the teacher and violently pulled his hair.”

The teacher is a strapping 28-year-old man with closely cropped hair. My daughter is willowy, just barely nine-year-old. How she managed to pull his hair at all, let alone with anything approaching violence is a mystery. The other mystery was where her aide was when all this was going down—or any classroom aide for that matter. Or where the O.T. was who had just been working with Katie. Or how any child can sneak around in a supposedly highly supervised special day class.

But the bottom line was this: Katie had been suspended on her birthday for five days.

To be continued…

NOTE: For those of you who missed the earlier parts to this story (or simply want to refresh your memory), you can find them here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. Sorry, but as you can see, my IEP stories are never short.

Until next time,
Cynthia Patton