Ian's speech continues to improve. We've waited so long for him to talk that every word he says makes us laugh and cry with relief.
He learned a joke from one of us videoes -- Where does a duck go to get his haircut? The baa-baa shop. He must have repeated that joke 100 times this week, and each time, he nearly killed himself laughing.
In Ice Age, there's a scene when a baby goes missing. When we watched the video on Friday, I asked Ian "Where's the baby?" He loved that sentence and went around repeating it all weekend putting stresses on different words or speeding it up. "Where's the BABY? Where'sababy? HEY, where's the baby?" It was like a Stephen King novel.
Helping to buoy our optimism was some recent assessment from outside evaluators. His pediatrician sized him up and said that he may just have a mild case of Sensory Integration Disorder, which in every case that she's seen has disappeared in elementary school. Ian was on the high end of active. She also said that he was clearly very, very smart.
We hired a private speech therapist, who said that Ian's speech wasn't that bad. He had very good articulation. He had shown off his knowledge of foreign languages that he picked up from a video and he actually has a nice French accent. His vocabulary is good. He did all the activities very nicely. She said "remarkable." Ian's biggest need is learning how to expand the number of sentences he uses, so that he can tell me what happened at school and play better with others. The boy needs some chit-chatting skills, though he speaks about as well as some of my Midwestern relatives.
Getting this independent confirmation of Ian's abilities and needs was so important for us, because I hadn't gotten anything from his school. First they would tell me that he was doing great. I would look at their checklist of his accompishments, and I would ask why he wasn't doing stuff at school that he did at home. Did this mean that they didn't know my child very well? No, they responded. It's because your kid is such a mess. OK, well then maybe the school needs to provide him with more services. No, he's doing fine.
They refused to provide me with any input about his daily progress in a communication notebook, which is a standard procedure for non-verbal kids.
I've asked to be tutored on therapy, so that I can continue efforts at home where he spends most of his day. Every stick of research on special education says that parents must reinforce skills at home. Didn't happen.
They told me that I shouldn't be involved in a meeting between the speech therapists, because I wasn't a "professional."
Livid.
Should I get the most expensive lawyer I can find and sue the school district into oblivion? How much do I want to do that, after I slash their tires in the parking lot? But I don't think that they will alter their behavior. Their condescending attitude towards parents and their do-the-minumum attitude will never change. I've decided to regard the morning as cheap childcare and spend the lawyer money on good therapy in the afternoon.
This is one of the prices of buying a home in a working class town. The school system has an excellent reputation, but I'm not impressed. The parents haven't demanded access to the school. Without parental involvement, the school will always be second rate. The pushy parents in the wealthy neighborhoods do make a difference.