Oh, Advocate, Why did you Abandon Us?

Fine, we'll make our OWN fun

I'm sure any number of country songs could accompany that title, but for me, life has descended so deeply into the "theatre of the absurd" that what plays in my mind as I write those words is glass breaking and a studio audience gasping before the laugh track is played.

No, she really did just abruptly abandon us.  She said that their goals had been met.  THEIR GOALS?  What were these?  Apparently, their goals were to have the IEP read a certain way, with no care or concern for whether or not he was ACTUALLY receiving the services.  SRSLY?!?

There are days when the mind-numbing ridiculousness of navigating the bureaucracy makes me want to start quoting Paul Revere or Thomas Jefferson, but I'll be a good girl for now and just spit and hiss and growl at the internet.

For example, and I'm not making this up....

After THREE YEARS of demanding OT at school, we finally "won" and he has "OT".  It was decidedly narrow, mind you, just to address his handwriting, and he'd have 30 minutes a week with her.  Here's what she's doing:  three sentences.  That's it.  He writes three sentences for her and goes back to his classroom.  I said in the IEP mtg, that unless those sentences were variations on "The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog" and she was correcting him on his f'ed up letters that she was (then I realized what I was about to say and finished my sentence in a way that would not have gotten me arrested or banned from future IEP meetings) under-serving him in my opinion.  Apparently my college degrees and graduate Special Ed training do not qualify me to assess the efficacy of an OT plan.  Of course not.  I'm just a parent.  Great.

But once it was written down, the Advocate was "all done".  She had gotten OT written in to the IEP, she had gotten this and that and the other written in, but yet the mounting evidence that this, that, and the other were not actually happening was irrelevant to her task list.

We're off to find a lawyer, the wonderful lawyers in Oz... (that's the musical theme to the next stage of my outraged life as a parent "in the system")  I'm already doing my own three hours of OT/PT/enrichment every day.  I already take him on private field trips (which they cannot provide an aide for and which only occur once a year...insert random cuss words into that sentence fragment, please), and the thought that the district is allowed to just phone it in and the Disability Rights folks are OKAY with that, well....lawyers oughtta be able to help me, right?

Probably not.  I'm about two steps away from homeschooling full time.  The de facto homeschooling AND dealing with the system crapola is for the birds.