Signed, sealed, delivered

Abby's IEP for the coming year is finished! Earl and I are very happy with it, and are confident that the plan will meet her needs and help her progress next year.

The whole Team process was different this year, and better. For years, I'd been writing goals in an effort to communicate to Abby's teachers and therapists the kinds of things we wanted included in her IEP. My input was generally not well-received (with a few exceptions.) I then tried a different approach, and corresponded or spoke with individual team members prior to the meeting, to try to get them to clue me in as to what they were thinking about in terms of recommendations. I was told more than once, with attitude, that the proper place to discuss such things was in team meeting.

This is why our Team meetings never ran under 3 hours and were usually more like a team meeting miniseries, which ran over several weeks. For some discussions and decisions, it was absolutely necessary to have the whole team there. But not for everything! It was a big fat frustrating and draining waste of time.

This year (cue the birdsong) the administration approached us about having a preliminary meeting, to open up the lines of communication and talk in general terms about what we were looking for. That meeting was very productive, and while the full Team meeting a week later still was very long, it was wonderful to, at last, feel like our input was welcomed and valued, and not begrudgingly accepted as it had seemed in some cases in the past. We did have a couple of things to work out after that meeting, but we and the administration did it. We signed off on the final IEP and sent it with Abby to school today. Total time from preliminary meeting to signing the plan: 2 weeks. A record.

And the entire process was so, so much better. No one took anything personally; no one said "that's the IEP and if you don't like it, you can reject it,"; no one had to get all legal and threaten (or move for) a hearing with the BSEA, as had happened for two out of the past three years. No one cried in the meeting. No one stormed out.

To be sure, some of this is because we're getting better at the process, ourselves. We're more experienced; we're calmer. But the biggest change has been in the school leadership, and that leadership at Abby's school is the best we've ever worked with.

One IEP down, one to go (Brian.) Hopefully that process will be similarly painless.