Thursday, May 7, 2015

And then it all went bad

And I'm still not sure why or how. He was great for a week and a half, then he started chasing kids around the classroom with a stapler. And scribbling potty words all over the walls of the room with a pink highlighter. And grabbing scissors off his teacher's desk. And trying to run out of the school. And pushing his teacher. And throwing things at me.

Repeatedly his special ed. teacher has had to pull the other kids out of the room while he acts out. And then no classwork gets done. Which, apparently, is what he wants.

Honestly I feel like I have whiplash. Within the space of several weeks -- granted not helped by spring break, or by kiddo's doctor-enforced ban on gym and recess while the cut on his forehead heals (four weeks, the plastic surgeon said, and HAHAHAHAHA YOU'RE KIDDING, I thought) -- his IEP team went from "we're going to try a new behavioral plan, it'll totally work!" to "the behavioral plan is totally working!" to "we can't handle him anymore and here is where you should send him instead."

Seems there's a self-contained program at one of the other schools in the district, more therapeutic, with a counselor on hand all day, smaller classes and extra aides in the room. More individualized academic goals. A separate room right nearby for decompressing and, as the terminology goes, "de-escalating." On paper it sounds promising. In person -- we've toured it twice, once with kiddo -- it also seems promising. In the IEP meeting, it sounded like "we give up and we're offloading him so he's someone else's problem." It's hard to know which impression to rely on.

I'm so unbelievably frustrated. Four years we've been working on this whole ADHD thing, four years of occupational therapy and behavioral therapy and classroom accommodations and fighting with the insurance company and tensing up every single time he has to be brought out in public, and we have gotten precisely nowhere. We might as well have been the crappy parents people clearly think we are, and ignored every single little thing he was doing instead of trying to help him. This is where my head is at.

I know, intellectually, that we're doing the best we can and we've worked really hard, and probably this program will help him, and eventually things will probably get better. But right now I'm thinking about how the other kids at the bus stop are going to ask why he isn't in class with them anymore, and I don't know how I'm supposed to answer that.

All I know is, if anyone wants to know what I want for Mother's Day, it's to be left alone. In bed. And to go at least one day without any reports on my kid's bad behavior.

I mean, an all-expenses-paid spa vacation would be nice too. But I'd like to keep my wish list in the realm of reality.

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