Please Keep Your Hands Inside The IEP At All Times

The roller coaster metaphor isn't just for things directly involving raising B. It applies on a macro scale, too.

Yesterday's IEP meeting went much better than the last one. The primary reason for this was the attendance of the county Autism Specialist. We love her. Once she arrived she asked questions that no one else in the room had considered.

Such as, "Where was he when the incident occured?".

We know B has problems with transitions from one part of the building to another and we know that P.E. is a stressful class for him. But it took the awesome Autism Expert to point out the fact that he was standing in line waiting to go into P.E. and that was probably a major factor.

Also, the horrible counselor turns out to not be as horrible as we thought.

Everybody in the meeting was on the same page and we added some behavioral items to his IEP along with ways to reinforce the behaviors both negatively and positively.

B is smart and very high-functioning in so many ways that it is often easy to forget that he simply doesn't make certain connections. Yet. So, it is surprising when he freaks out about something or can't calm down after a reasonable amount of time because he spends most of his day looking and acting like the neurotypical kids.

I'm going to push for the Autism Specialist to be at all of our IEP meetings from now on. She and his special-ed teacher work well together and we need her on his team. She stressed the need for the reinforcers to be consistent and immediate and she had the best, most practical advice anyone has provided at one of these things.

We're going to have to change the way we do some things at home and I might post about that later. For now, suffice it to say that we are coordinating with the teachers and other staff members at B's school to make sure he gets everything he needs.

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