Getting Started!

It's been a really long couple of months, in the education world.  I feel like I've been eating and breathing IEP's, NOREP's and all that other alphabet soup that special ed is made of.  School districts that talk about wanting to have open, trusting, cooperative relationships with parents set meetings but don't bother to tell parents about them.  They come to agreements at IEP meetings and send NOREP's that "oops!" didn't quite say what was agreed to.  When you say you need to have a meeting to go over the NOREP, since it didn't say what was agreed to, they look at you like you have three heads and claim that the NOREP NEVER says where the child is going to have a program, or that there will be a program beyond the 30 minutes a week ...


Yeah, an open, trusting relationship.  


It's tiring.


I talk to other moms, and they're tired, too.  But they're tired with their first child, with their only child.  I'm tired with my grandchild.  If I count him as a child, he'd be my fourth child.  I can't even count how many IEP meetings I've sat through.  I've never had a screaming match.  The meetings are always polite and professional, even when there are disagreements.  But not notifying the parent of the time and date, just because you're irritated that she's tired enough to bring an advocate?  Really?  What are the schools thinking?  How tired does a parent have to be, when the parent has to take off from work, again, and hire an advocate, to come to a meeting that should never have had to have happened, to get a NOREP that says what it should have said to begin with?


Parents of kids with special needs are tired.  We get less sleep than other parents.  We need to learn more than other parents - about the specific issues our children face, the educational systems we deal with, the legal system, sometimes the medical and/or psychiatric systems, the "special" post-secondary options, etc. We tend to have more responsibility for our children, who are less likely to have peer-relationships that allow for "shared" responsibility (kids with special needs are just not as likely to spend a day off from school rotating among friends houses so parents have reduced needs for alternative child care).  And with all this comes the emotional cost.  Our friends with typical kids don't "get" it.  They mean well.  But they don't get it.  So we find our real peers - other parents with kids with special needs.  We find each other, we gravitate towards each other.  There is a comfort level we can never find with the other folks out there.  We adore our kids.  We love them fiercely.  But we need to be able to talk to other parents who know in the core of their being, what it is we're talking about.  We need to be with people where we aren't anthropological specimens to be studied; or worse, anomalies to be feared.  And so, we sometimes pare down our worlds a bit.