IEP meeting

We had Akila's IEP meeting this year. Here entire team is new except her 1:1 aide and the associate principal, who only stays for a few minutes. Her special ed teacher, school psychologist and 4 core academic teachers are all new. This is cool, it just means putting in some extra time to get to know a new group of people.

The meeting went really well, and I am so grateful for that. I have so many friends who have nightmare stories from IEP meetings and the fallout after the meeting. Akila has a really great team and people who are willing to figure her out, work with her, and cheer her on. I think I wrote about this but I'm too tired to look back, but I think that Akila has been treating her aide very poorly the last month since doesn't have the opportunity to be rude to us while she stays at the crisis home. Her special ed teacher has seen some of her attitude, but she has hidden it from the main teachers.

As a matter of fact, the teachers all had great things to say about how hard Akila has been working and how she has been pretty focused. They have done some testing in the last 2 weeks and her lexile reading scores went up and are around 627, which is an improvement. Her math testing stayed the same as last spring which is awesome that she didn't regress. I am really happy that she is working hard and doing well, but I am also cautious. She has a pattern of around November each year, starting to decline and lose interest. That is when she starts to feel comfortable with the new teacher(s) and the kids in her classes.

I remember last year, at the October conferences (which are next week), her teacher saying that she was doing great and she had very few issues. Then at the March conferences, she was talking about how much she was struggling with Akila's behaviors and being so mean to other kids. That is pretty typical, I hear how great she is at the beginning of the year, and then after January I hear a little different tune. Oh how I wish she could continue with the academic start that she has so far, I will be praying for that.

There is a new "consumer" at the crisis home- that is what they call them. Evidently, Akila doesn't like him after two days. This morning, she was trying to go after the kid and attack him. This kid is 16 and has been described to me by Akila and a staff person, as being very large. Another typical FASD thing, they have no sense of who they could even take on. This kid could crush her. She has been taking a taxi to school, and the staff had a hard time getting her into the taxi she was so worked up about this boy and wanting to go after him.

She called me after school and I asked how her day was. She said "Good. Well, kind of good". I asked why it was kind of good. She said she had a bad morning at the house. I asked why. She started in a tirade about this boy and how she doesn't like him and he keeps getting in her business and she is going to smack him right in the face and on and on she went. All the while, using her ghetto talk attitude voice. I had the feeling that the boy was within ear shot of her and I was trying to distract her to a different topic so she didn't antagonize him and get him to come and attack her. She wanted to keep going on though. She said he said something about me!!!! I said I didn't care and to just ignore it.

The staff said that Akila was the one being mean to him and starting the whole thing, which I can see happening. They might have their hands full with this combo, like they weren't already full.