{"id":200022,"date":"2007-06-08T17:49:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-08T22:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/06\/08\/things-i-never-thought-id-say-non-bush-edition\/"},"modified":"2007-06-08T17:49:00","modified_gmt":"2007-06-08T22:49:00","slug":"things-i-never-thought-id-say-non-bush-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/06\/08\/things-i-never-thought-id-say-non-bush-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Things I Never Thought I’d Say, Non-Bush Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"
At my daughter’s IEP (I<\/b>ndividual E<\/b>ducation P<\/b>rogram) meeting, my wife PLAYED THE GOOD COP<\/b><\/big>, and our lawyer played the bad cop.<\/p>\n

I never figured that she’d play the GOOD<\/span> cop in a meeting with school administrators.<\/p>\n

My wife is a dear sweet lady. She is also a Special Ed consultant with a practice, SEDRA<\/b><\/a> where she supplies Educational Evaluations, Classroom Observations, Advocacy, IEP Process Workshops, In-School Tutoring for Individuals with Special Needs, and Service Referral.<\/p>\n

She spent half of her childhood in the Bronx, and one of her clients affectionately referred to her as a “Pit bull”.<\/div>\n

Both of our children are on IEPs, but did not need a lawyer for our eldest, a turning 10 years old in a week girl, Natalie, for the past 3 years. We found Mark Martin<\/a> for her.<\/p>\n

Natalie has a visual perception and motor planning disorder, that results in dyslexia and dysgraphia (her hand writing is worse than mine, which means that her handwriting is the worst ever).<\/p>\n

Our lawyer for our son, 7 and a half year old Charlie, Wayne Steedman<\/a> said that it would be best if we went with another lawyer for Natalie, because having to focus on more than one child at a time tends to diffuse the lawyer’s effort.<\/p>\n

Well, lawyers are sharks or piranhas. Wayne is more of a shark. Mark is more of a piranha.<\/p>\n

Both are far more pleasant than one would imagine when they are YOUR<\/span> carnivorous fish.<\/p>\n

The shark glides, silently and unnoticed, until it strikes, while the piranha is a flurry of teeth, reducing a cow to bones in under a minute (why is it that they always use a cow as the unit of measure of ferocious appetites?)<\/p>\n

While Natalie’s school, Timber Grove Elementary<\/a> is a good school, it has a profoundly negative attitude towards special ed kids.<\/p>\n

I think that it’s primarily a function of the Principal, who has been nicknamed “The Scorpion”.<\/p>\n

There are a disproportionate number of children, who are either at special schools run by the county, or in private placements paid for by the county who are in this school’s zone.<\/p>\n

This seems to be particularly noteworthy with regards to the male special ed students.<\/p>\n

Considering all the costs involved in private placements, I wonder if the principal has a picture of the superintendent getting freaky with a goat.<\/p>\n

At Natalie’s meeting, the occupational therapist (kind of a misnomer, it’s about things like writing, tying shoes, and other fine motor operations) had a report suggesting that Natalie’s services be pulled. The first time any of our side saw it was at the meeting.<\/p>\n

I was conferencing in via phone, but even I could tell that Mark Martin, esq., was not amused.<\/p>\n

I think that the OT might end up with a diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder after Mark was through with her.<\/p>\n

It put the fear of god into the rest of IEP team, so while we do not have OT goals yet, we will be doing a follow-up meeting to take care of that, it looks like Natalie will get the services she needs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At my daughter’s IEP (Individual Education Program) meeting, my wife PLAYED THE GOOD COP, and our lawyer played the bad cop. I never figured that she’d play the GOOD cop in a meeting with school administrators. My wife is a dear sweet lady. She is also a Special Ed consultant with a practice, SEDRA where …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[962,976,1197],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-40yrs","category-family","category-special-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200022"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200022\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}