Not your average European "Grand Tour"...

This morning, courtesy of Aunt Patty Cake's taking on Charlie chauffeur duties, was the Tour o' Kindergarden Placements in preparation for Charlie's upcoming IEP meeting.

My District minder (let's call him Pat Matt) and I convoyed throughout the Greater PB/Clairemont/Clairemont Mesa region in search of the Just-Right Classroom for next year. No monuments, no cathedrals, and no cafes...just lots of schlepping and trying to fix my face. It is a full-time, upper cortex endeavor for me to NOT grimace outwardly at the abundance of unprofessional or uninformed comments, to NOT well up at the sheer adversity of wee lives, to NOT grow sullen and withdrawn at the futility of finding a "happy place", to NOT take an occasional long-shot with my minds-eye camcorder to wonder WTF am I doing here (i.e., tangent-time: how did Miss I-went-to-Northwestern! turn into I-wear-Via-Spiga-shoes-to-traipse-about-special-education-programs). Cannot help but take note that the process truly stinks-aloud to face this task against a backdrop of Big, Bad Deployment and admittedly, elevated Mama hormones. Poor Pat Matt cannot imagine or empathize...but he did intimate that I was making progress on my personal goal of being "Less Mean and Wicked." At least my minder is clever, witty, and appreciative of the finer points of sarcastic repartee...a big step up (probably due to years of my being just that Mean and Wicked) from when I warranted stupid and/or boring minders. Or maybe, I'm willing to admit, PM just drew the very shortest possible straw.

First stop: Sessions Elementary.
Placement description: "Support Room", serving the needs of K-thru-5.
Highlight: Substitute teacher glowing about the success of instituting a schedule and routine in the support room.
Lowlight: The word "substitute" in the sentence above. Oh, wait, and that she doesn't have a special ed credential yet is in a special day class setting. (She does have a general ed credential, so there). Reference to kids with "more severe" autism needing to be transferred out of the school so that their needs could be met.
My concern: Pilot program that hasn't reached cruising altitute. Still being defined by a Central Office/"ivory annex" theory that isn't attached to needs of particular kids. More adults than children in the room.

Placement description: General education classrooms.
Highlight: Mrs. Walker's class...wherein you can almost hear the choir singing, it's so perfect in its perfection. (Jamie had Mrs. W twice, God bless her).
Lowlight: Another teacher's class...chaos -- visual and auditory and kid-related. (Jamie almost had this teacher, but I held him out of school for a month until he could be reassigned to Mrs. W. Did have a smug feeling that only comes with Confirmation of a Past Great Call by Mom).
My concern: Trying to envision Charlie producing work commensurate with what was on the walls in Mrs. W's class. Trying to picture Charlie surviving the other class...er, trying to picture the Crabbiest Queen Mum surviving Charlie not progressing in the other class.

Second stop: Bayview Terrace.
Placement description: "Moderate/severe" (the placement previously known as PACE combined with the placement previously known as ILS).
Highlight: TEACCH set-up of my 1999 dreams. Teacher has PhD. from Univ. of San Diego in autism and seemed wholly fabulous. Spacious room. A child's AAC device was incorporated into the AM circle.
Concern: Access to behavioral/communication/social peer models. No access to grade-level curricular standards. Teacher will be out for at least part of next year.

Third stop: Bay Park Elementary.
Placement description: "Non-severe".
Highlights: The teacher was great. The materials were up-to-date and in use. The calibre of instruction/work being accomplished. The classroom management strategies were used for every student if they were needed for one. (Let's not overlook the pleasant office staff!) Speech on-site 4 days per week. Have the heavens opened and poured out the sunbeams just for us?!
Concern: Didn't see a Charlie present. All the kids were independently functioning in the environment. All the kids were far more verbal than Charlie. Difficult to imagine Charlie completing the tasks we observed without significant supports, which no other children were receiving. No diapers visible either.

Fourth stop: Whitman Elementary.
Placement description: "SLI" (Speech-Language Intensive).
Highlights: Pleasant teacher. In fairness, she followed the Perfect Classroom.
Lowlight: Clearly located on the spec-ed side of the campus...DHH class on one side and another SDC down the way. Classroom was too small/square/compact for the number of kids, 4 kids shared each little circular table, and stuff was everywhere.

As Pat Matt had predicted, there was a clear stand-out winner (that being Bay Park). Alas, The Crab Matriarch still finds it challenging to go with the flow for the following reasons:

1. Show me a Charlie-like child and where they are succeeding. Didn't see a Charlie in the whole lot.
2. Bell times for Bay Park require Charlie to give up the overwhelming majority of his current services (private speech, private OT sessions, private PT, private ABA, and Regional Center home program). Start time of 9:05 a.m. and dismissal of 3:35 p.m. The only day he'd have availability for non-District services would be Thursday minimum days.
3. Very minimal "fun" on display.
4. The lure of the "Academic Red-Shirt". He's a boy, born in the summer, with a spot in preschool available to him for next year.
5. Once he sets foot in a District classroom, he must move from grade-to-grade. (In contrast to my thought that he might gain more from the WunderTeacher were he to have an extra year of maturity before he starts the social promotion march).
6. Didn't see one classroom in which I thought he would learn academic material in the teaching modality in use during the observation. I saw only group instruction, except for 2 occasions of 1-1 and several instances of do-it-yourself. 1-1 was clearly not ABA/DTT.
7. Where do you put a kid with an average IQ but who doesn't have a group-appropriate way to communicate understanding???
8. What happens when he hits the next, fun illness jag and misses more school than he attends?
9. How much of Charlie's "space-the-final-frontier" variable attention is structure, how much is electrical, and how much is chemical? What good is it for him to sit in the World's Most Nearly-Perfect Placement if all he hears are crickets chirping and if all he notices is the magnetic foam alphabet above the board?
10. What's wrong with the status quo for another year, given all the other change coming to his planet?

Pat Matt and I ended the tour-group with a perfectly cordial handshake, knowing that his would be the District offer and realizing that the world is patently unfair: there is no right answer for Charlie. We discussed the stipulations within the mediation agreement and P.M. tried to, not unkindly, point out that my lifestyle would not be adversely affected by having Charlie go on a bus and "get his needs met". The problem remains: No guarantee -- and years of evidence to the contrary -- that his needs would be met by District alone. This fact sends my lifestyle to the bottom of the priority list because, as we all know (or at least Patty Essdoubleyou, Patty Xena, and the Crab Queen to be sure agree) there's no lifestyle points if your crablet is floundering...even if you aren't there witnessing it 7-hours a day.

My head, it hurts. And, unlike Aunt Patty Cake and Patty Kiki, I don't have a salt-kissed margarita awaiting me at 5 p.m. The injustice of it all!