Finn turning 3 is bittersweet because once he turns 3 he will age out of the Help Me Grow program he has been in since he was 4 months. The team of professionals following his progress, helping me with any and all questions I have about therapy, funding, education, adaptive equipment, doctors...will be gone. Of course Finn will be going to another program, Franklin County Board of MRDD, but I feel like we have to start over again. On top of all this change, Finn is now old enough to go to preschool which means now the school district get involved with Finn. I have always been nervous about meeting with the school district, bc I don't know if they are capable of meeting all of Finn's needs. After meeting with our school district TWICE, I am confident that they are DEFINITELY not the school I want Finn to go to. At our initial meeting, the school psychologist came to our home, sat down at our kitchen table with me, Finn, and our service coordinator, and did not even acknowledge that Finn was at the table with us. She didn't look at him, talk to him...nothing. As his parent and advocate, I am extremely conscious of how people interact with Finn, especially professionals having meetings with me about Finn. If someone acts like Finn is invisible, I am pissed. Especially a school psychologist! Who's job is to go to the special needs children homes and start the paperwork to complete their IEP! This woman never reviewed anything about our case. She didn't know are history or anything...even though she had all the paper work in front of her. I was immediately turned off. Then when I told her that Finn has vision issues, she didn't know how to go about getting a vision specialist in to see Finn to do an assessment on him that will help write his IEP. So obviously this school has no experience with kids who have low vision. After that disastrous meeting, I cried to my service coordinator. This first impression of this school district was terrible, my confidence in them was shot. Luckily she talked me off the ledge, gave me some great advice on how to handle the next coming weeks when the school will do their assessment on Finn, and then his initial IEP meeting.
Last week Finn had his assessment with the school district, and I wish I could say that it went better. I tried going in with an open mind. That day Finn met with a school psychologist (a different one that came to our house) a PT, OT, and a speech therapist. The PT was very nice. She was great with Finn. The OT was pretty good too...the speech therapist however, was ignorant. The PT and OT were on the ground playing with Finn, seeing what his gross and fine motor skills were and asking me questions about how he is at home. The speech therapist asked me a few questions trying to determine how Finn communicates with us. While I am on the floor talking to the PT, I overhear the speech therapist say to an assistant that is in the room with us, "I can't ask any of my questions bc he can't really do anything". I couldn't believe my ears. This ignorant professional said this within shouting distance of me and my kid. The mama bear in me wanted to go over and choke her. But I kind of just laughed to myself and thought 'over my dead body will Finn ever attend this school'. For the record, I have been asked those standard communication questions a 100 times by different professionals and they all have been able to adapt the questions to fit Finn's skills. For what Finn has to work with, he is very perceptive, and understands a lot of what Ethan and I say to him. And for someone who doesn't know him and just assumes that Finn can't communicate his wants or needs to people is just ignorant. and it's obvious that these professionals do not have the experience with someone with Finn's condition. So he will be going somewhere else. We have our final meeting with the school in 2 weeks. and I plan on telling them that I think they were unprofessional and left a terrible impression on us.
For now Finn will continue to go to the school he is at right now. He loves it there, I love it there, and the teachers, therapists, administration staff, everybody is incredibly nice and they have the experience and knowledge of special needs children. Finn can stay there until he is 6 so we have time to figure out where he will go from there.
