Emme's IEP meeting
Earlier this week we had an Individualized Educational Plan (IEP) meeting regarding Emmeline. It's an annual event that most parents of children with special ed dread. We tend to go in with the "a team" in our corner, so it's become easier to bear over the years; this year we had two reps from Emme's after school program, our ed advocate, and a rep from another program that works with the family, so it helped balance it out between the school and the family.
We weren't really looking for a lot of new services this year. We just wanted to iron out some wrinkles in her Behavior Intervention Plan (BIP) which the school falls back on when Emme runs into difficult behavior patterns; not at all uncommon for a kid who has bipolar disorder. So the meeting went well and everyone left.
On the way home, Bonnie said to me, "You know, it probably wouldn't be as easy if we didn't come with the people that we do."
And thinking back on it, I suspect that she's right -- before we started coming to team meetings with a team of our own, Bonnie and I often felt outnumbered and outflanked. It's sad but true -- the lesson here is, never go to an IEP meeting alone.