Awesome IEP

Well we had Evan's IEP on Thursday and I am very happy to say that it went very well. I am thrilled with the school he is going to and all the services that he is going to recieve. Here it is in a nutshell:

PT - 50 minutes 1x a week
OT - 30 mins 1x a week
Speech - 30 mins 1 x a week
Adaptive PE - 30 mins 1x a week
Feeding - up to 15 sessions in the school year

The main thing that I wanted was to get PT provided by the District so I came away very happy, the meeting went really well and I did not feel tense or nervous the whole time and I felt that everyone really had Evan's best interest in mind. My husband was there and he was reluctant to attend at first thinking he was there just because I was forcing him to be, and he left very glad that he went. I told him that he is required to attend these meetings once a year, and I think now he really understands that it is important. He sometimes feels out of the loop because sometimes I forget to tell him things or I tell him and he is not listening. You know a typical husband.

Evan is going to a Headstart preschool which collaborates with the County office of education to provide the program to special education children. So there will be a team of teachers or paraeducators consisting of the Head Start teacher, her assistants, the Special Education teacher and 2-3 para educators. In the class there are 15 typical children and 5 special needs children.

I can't say how excited I am about this program, I think it is going to be great for Evan and I just have a feeling that he will flourish in this program. The program last year certainly left something to be desired and even the program specialist for preschool apologized to me for the unorganization etc but it was pretty much out of her hands because they had such a hard time finding a teacher.

The speech therapist is very well educated in the use of his Dynavox and is going to make that a major goal with Evan, so I am hoping we can replace some of his pointing and grunting with use of the Dynavox. I am actually letting her take it home to do some programming on it and then she will be able to show me some of what she has in mind for Evan and I can carryover what they are doing at school. The special ed teacher made some awesome goals for him and I am just really excited about this new year for him.

Some other things that are going to happen are a psychological exam to see where he is cognitively etc. I am rating him at about 2years level in most areas, so I am curious to see what the professionals say, this is going to happen sometime this year. Also, the inclusion specialist from our local elementary school is going to come and evaluate Evan in the spring to see if he is ready to go to a regular kindergarten with assistance or what other options are available for him. I am not ready for this to be happening but at least I put it off until March or so.

All in all, things went well. We go see the neurologist on September 4th to review the EEG and sleep study that he had, so I will update on that.