The Annual IEP Meeting

We had Morgan's annual IEP meeting today. It was a whirlwind of discussion and juggling teachers, therapists and two little girls as we sat at a "kid-sized" table in Morgan's classroom. Overall it went well. Morgan has met all of her goals (at least to the 80% requirement..) and now has completely new ones. We are so proud of her! She seems to have especially come a long way since she started the AIM program in September.

I won't go into details of her new goals quite yet. I am still working out clarification on one of them. It needs to be amended or possibly another goal added. She has some good challenges for the next year that currently seem daunting...but her goals last year felt that way at first and she did great.

I was impressed with two things at this meeting. The first was that the school principal participated. He was not involved last time, so I was surprised to see him when we walked in. He seems to genuinely care about all the kids and I like that he is so involved in the details. I guess I hope that this is the case with all school principals, but I'm not familiar with how involved they are day to in these sorts of meetings. The school psychologist was not there this time, but this made sense to me as I believe overall we have confidence in Morgan's placement for now and really we did not discuss anything that the other teachers and therapists couldn't handle.

The other thing was that the Speech and Language Pathologist (SLP) attended as well. She did have to split her time between two IEP meetings, but the fact that she was there was amazing. If you remember Morgan does not technically qualify for speech therapy per the district's evaluations. During the AIM parent night I discovered that the SLP really does work closely with the kids in the intervention classroom, so Morgan is receiving these services in an way I was not aware of. At the home visit I brought up a point that concerns both the social and language areas... so I was thrilled to see they incorporated this into her IEP and involved the SLP in a greater way than I thought they might. She also agreed to meet with me at a separate time to discuss our RDI program. These therapists are certainly not required to do this, so I am excited that she agreed to it. Now I've got to follow up and get it scheduled!

We continue to be impressed with Morgan's school and the AIM program. I always hear horror stories about school districts and their refusal to provide services. Unless the wool's been pulled over our eyes, we think we've got a good deal so far. Let's hope this continues.