Thinking about calling a meeting.

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I want to get some objective views on this. My son has Aspergers and is 9 1/2. Our district is pretty good overall. He is very social. He goes to a social skills class daily for the first 20 minutes of school and is pulled out twice a week for speech. He has always been very verbal, but lacks some pragmatic skills. The discrtict offers all kinds of parent support groups and parent classes every month too. I think all in all, they are fairly supportive. My biggest issue is the implementation. The district's psychologists recommended so many stratgies to make his schooling better and then most of it never happens. His teacher was one of the special ed teachers last year. She is not young (late 30, early 40s), but she moved to our disctrict and couldn't get her own classroom until this year. From what I can tell from her resume, she has no formal special ed training though and this is her first classroom in our district. She was at our ARD (IEP) meeting the beginning of the year and she knows everything that was discussed. We speak probably once a month and every time my son has any major issues.

Several things have been building and bothering me and I am thinking about calling a meeting specifically to get her on the right page, but I am unsure at this point. The latest issue happened today, but he regularly pulls his clip for this stuff. He received 5 minutes of think track for not putting his name on a paper. (This happens weekly. I know they give it to other students to, but it seems stupid for a very forgetful AS kid.) He says he then received 10 minutes of Think Track for not listening during an assignment. (I also know she probably gave him several reminders, but really does he need Think Track for being spacey and she has been doing this more often lately.) The next part I am a bit confused by. Apparently some of the teachers were yelling at one another from opposite ends of the hall. One couldn't hear his teacher and he told his teacher "She told ya, man." in a funny voice. He wasn't angry, he thought he was being funny. Usually the next clip is 15 minutes of think track, but instead, she skipped it and sent him to another classroom for redirect. (She has done this before and it has bugged him in the past as he sees it as bypassing the system and skipping to a harsher punishment. However, he seems to have taken it today in stride as I didn't even hear about this until much later after school was out.) He told me all of this, I recieved no redirct form, which I normally would receive when he has had a redirect in the past.

Other things have ben bothering me since Nov. Apparently, the special ed teacher kept telling my son every morning during social skill class that if he ever needed to come in during the day to jump on the trampoline, he could. He mentioned this to me finally the end of Nov. When he tells me, tt jars my memory that in his ARD we had said he could have breaks during the day. I called the teacher to talk about some other problems he was having and mentioned this. She said that yes, he did mention it to her, but she wanted him to basically get it as a reward. ( She seems to want to make any coping mechanism I come up with to be on a reward basis.) I finally called the special ed teacher and she got involved and he now has his day broken down by subject with happy/sad faces on how he behaved throughout the day (A bit juvenile for him, but it also had three, five minute break times for him down the hall too, so I was happy overall.) Most days he tells me he either gets one, sometimes two of those breaks. It seems his teacher makes him remember each of his breaks, so if they are busy, he doesn't remember them.

Also, he is suppose to be able to make-up any instruction time he misses when he is out for speech or social skills. If I call her on it, she will say she has to by law and that he always gets it, but that isn't really true. he ahs made poor grades a few times on some social strudies work that I later found out was covered during his morning group. Also, except for one week, he has always gotten the challenge spelling words when they have the pretest. He is a very good speller. However, he has speech on T/TH and whenever they have a Monday holiday, the pretest ends up being on Tuesdays during his speech time. Every time this hapens, he gets the regular words sent home because he sasys he wasn't in the room for the pretest. Granted, this isn't a huge deal, but it just again illustrates that he misses work and she doesn't allow him to make it up.

If you ask him, he says he hates school and he doesn't like his teacher. Howver, he gets over things very quickly and never holds a grudge and will go crazy to say to her if we were to see her anywhere. He said the same about last eyars teacher and anytime he sees her ont eh lawn now he runs up to her and gives her a big hug. His teacher isn't awful. In her way, she likes my son and has told me that she thinks he is funny. However, she is failing in really helping him be comfortable in the classroom. ( I won't even go into the long story on his seating arangement.)

So, what is everyone's opinion?

It sounds like since this teacher doesn't have specialised training, she is doing the minimum that she is required to do for his education plan. In my experience, these plans can be as general or specific as the authors think that they need to be. It doesn't mean that she's a bad teacher, just that her inexperience shows in that she is not able to implement his supports in any consistent way. Does this make sense?

I would decide which issues are the most important for his well-being day-to-day, and request more detailed plans for those items. Putting all of it in writing within a written request for a meeting would be ideal. I think this would show the team that you are serious and that they should be prepared to answer your questions when you do meet.

Also if you have any kind of advocacy groups in your community, sometimes someone who knows the state/federal laws can come with you to these meetings as support/back-up.

This approach may appear that you are distrustful of their work, but it's better to be clear. In my experience, very nice but inept teachers relied on my politeness to allow them to put my concerns on the back burner. Be a squeaky (but polite) wheel

I just returned. Sorry about the typos. I had kids running around me at the end and posted quick. I am not the best typist.