no school for you......

It has been a quiet week so far. Tyler has been occupying himself with "Winnie the Pooh" and making his elaborate toys to dangle and swing around. Looks like we are going to have 9 more weeks of that.

Believe me. That wasn't the plan. I was planning on him being in summer school right now. I had even done all the footwork and participated in all the necessary meetings. Heck! I even had a SIGNED IEP 5 weeks before summer school was scheduled to start!! ( I kind of planned it that way. That big chunk of time would have been necessary for the new school to HIRE and TRAIN a new aide for my little one.)

Silly rabbit. I signed the thing and exhaled whilst counting on the district to follow through. And typically, I would have been checking up on them. But, once I was sucked into the swirly of managing Spencer's transition, I lost all sense of sound and smell. I couldn't have told you what day it was.

Occassionally I would remember the IEP and somewhere in the back of my mind I was imagining the wheels of progress spinning. Having that new school to count on for Ty was comforting.

The first clue that something was wrong was the deafening silence. No one was calling me. No one was asking me about busing or start times or aides...nothing. Hmmmmm, I thought to myself. These people are either super confident or there maybe darker forces at work. And nothing in my mind wanted it to be the latter.

So, I made the dreaded calls, left the messages and then sent the emails that emoted my ever escalating concerns. ( I even called the secretary of the director of Spec.Ed checking to make sure that my administrator wasn't on vacation).

FINALLY I get the dreaded email. "we have been trying to contact the school and we aren't getting any responses....it looks like they are on vacation". True that! You waited until the school year ended and THEN you decide to call!

It looks like Ty won't be going to summer school after all. I called the new school and she was confused. Why was she getting snippy messages from our district? Why would they be so upset when this call is the FIRST one they have ever gotten?? ( I explained to her that they were really pissed at themselves because, yet again, my boy was forgotten and they didn't do their job and PLEASE don't take it personally. They are getting heat from me and now they are playing CYA). Hadn't even gotten a copy of the IEP yet.

Therefore the moral of this story is: don't EVER count on people following through out of the goodness of their hearts. Your kids are competing with the attention and urgency of HUNDREDS of other IEP's. JUST because YOU have taken the time to develop a great working relationship with your administrators....aka you are civil and don't act like a *&^ch....you cannot count on them to put your kid at the top of the "to-do" list.

ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS.....follow through. (BTW, I did follow through after the IEP. I called and found out that the "paperwork was passed on to the director. She was going to review it and then they were going to be calling the new school.) (That call happened FOUR weeks before summer school was scheduled to start.)

So, here we are. The weeks are ahead of us. All is not lost and most of all, I am SUPREMELY grateful that I don't have Spence to contend with as well.

This is our FIRST therapy-free summer in 10 years. And the silence is golden.