Going to "War" with the local school district

[camosgurl0820]

Ok so let me backtrack this story a bit. My youngest daughter who just turned 3 has severe expressive language imparment. She has etucian tubes which according to the doctors she can hear fine she just can't speek. She has a handful of words but at this age she should have close to 200 words and start to put them in sentences (mommy go bye bye daddy or whatever). So we have been going to speech classes for 18 months at the USC school of speech and hearing under the direction of baby net. Had an evaluation done back a few months back with the lexington richland disctrict 5 and my baby net provider did not show up. Apparently she was supposed to. Come to find out she quit and all her cases were in a big black hole. Well I did some digging at the last speech appoinment we had this summer and the director of the speech sessions found the information for me. I contacted this woman and she apologized to me for only just getting to the file. So I explained to her what the school district told me, that we would be getting a call 2 weeks before she turns 3. She then asked if she could come to the next meeting I of course said yes. She told me that she contacted the district and that someone would be calling me to set up an appointment. About a week after that I got a call. So I went to the meeting. Again it was only me and my girls. The therapists took Sarah to a room and I filled out a questionaire. The door was part way closed so when I was finished I kept peering into the room. She seemed to be doing well based on the praise she was getting from the psychologist and speech therapist. They asked me a few more questions and set up a second meeting to discuss the resluts of the IEP. I went to the meeting and again I was alone. This meeting took place and they told me that even though she scored low in one area she scored high in the cognative area and every time she made an attempt at something they gave her credit for saying what she was supposed to say. So the verdict was that she was too smart to join the preschool program but she qualified for speech two times a week for 30 minutes each day. I have no clue what kind of test this is or what the guidelines are but we don't agree with their findings. I was confused on what the IEP said and wondered why they didn't do a language test on her so my MIL dissected the paperwork and there are tons of incongruities in the paperwork. To start the School for the Deaf and Blind was never invited to the meeting and I was never given a form to inital that says it's ok for these people not to be here and have the meeting anyway. I was also given a paper to sign that said I was given the guidelines for parental rights and when I went through everything they gave me at the meeting I had nothing that said parental rights on it.

So we have a second meeting set up and I'm bringing some "ammuntion" in the meantime MIL has talked to the school district office supervisor, two different school district's preschool evaluators, a speech language pathologist, and a director of speech and hearing and all the people we spoke to said that one of the scores was low enough to qualify for a preschool progam. Most programs need two scores below the norm but she had one score that qualified as two as being an 'at need' child. So now we're questioning the evaluation.

[arielmom]

Aug. 27, 2008 at 7:38 PM

WOW! Girl, I hope you get it worked out! DONT LET THEM BULLY YOU!!!