Transitions

I attended the Transition Meeting last night at Zach’s school, with his mother. This meeting was held by the school to inform parents about the process of transitioning our special-needs children from the early intervention preschool to a Board of Education run kindergarten. I thought writing about it might help me make more sense of it.

Not surprisingly, given the bureaucracy that is involved, the process is somewhat convoluted and contradictory. The first step is to sign and send in a permission slip allowing the B.O.E. to evaluate your child. While Mia has done this, it was noted that the B.O.E. would go ahead and do this anyway, with or without parental permission. Next, the evaluation team from each district will come into the school and review each child’s preschool evaluation, including all the reports from the various therapists etc. The team may or may not be familiar with young children or young children with special needs; it is simply luck of the draw. Their qualification is that they are certified to administer psychological testing (read as: I.Q. testing and a behavioral evaluation). They will conduct their tests and do a parent interview (this raises some difficulties) and submit their reports to the C.S.E. (Committee on Special Education).

Sometime in February or March we will be notified of a date to attend a CSE meeting, where the IEP for the child will be drawn up. This is the big one, as a lot of things are riding on this meeting. It will include the evaluation team, the parents, the child’s teachers (and possibly therapists) and quite possibly the parent’s lawyer, if they are expecting to have to sue the BOE for private school tuition. It is at this meeting that Zach will be officially labeled with one of the fifteen or so classifications that the BOE uses – in Zach’s case this will most likely be “autism”. The IEP will dictate what services Zach will receive and what services he will not. This will also dictate his placement options. We were informed last night that it is very unlikely that Zach will continue to receive anywhere near as much speech therapy as he really needs, and certainly will not continue to receive the home-based speech therapy sessions.

After the CSE meeting the BOE team works up a placement by May or June and the real fun starts. Hopefully, the parents have already looked at the school(s) that is/are in the placement and can decide whether they agree to it or not. This can be problematic if the placement is issued after school is out for the summer and the parents have not seen the school and must scramble to gather the information needed to make an intelligent decision. If you reject the placement, the process goes to an Impartial Hearing (read as: lawsuit) where lawyers are certainly involved on both sides. Many parents who have decided that private schools are the only viable option have done this; and it raises a lot of ancillary difficulties, such as getting accepted to private schools (the application deadlines are happening right now), paying attorney’s fees and laying out the tuition (thirty to seventy thousand dollars) of a private school, in the hopes of being reimbursed by the BOE. It would be very nice not to have to take this route – time will tell.

The part about the whole process that I find most grimly fascinating is the inherent dichotomy of the CSE meeting. It really pits the parents against themselves. Let me elaborate: one goal is to get the most services possible for your child. This is accomplished by making the case and providing evidence that your child is “severely disabled” in some way and needs these services. On the other hand, you want your child put into a program that will challenge them and these programs may not take “severely disabled” children. The matter is further complicated if you factor in the private school thing. In this case you want to have the IEP reflect the need for very extensive services, services which the BOE is incapable of providing, therefore forcing them to agree to pay for a private school that can. Of course if you lose your Impartial Hearing case, you are really stuck. I guess what I’m saying is that it is difficult to go for both the best public placement and still leave your child with enough services and/or the option of winning an Impartial Hearing to pursue the private alternative. You must choose, and must do so beforehand, without having all of the information that you need in order to make a sensible choice – riddle me that one Batman?