I went to a parents meeting for pre-school special needs kids transitioning to kindergarten. It was serious overkill for Kitten, as much of the meeting had to do with how to assuage fears and concerns about kids going into K (and what the consequences were if they didn’t).
Bottom line for Katherine is that she should sign up for her “neighborhood” school, and in the spring, at the school, we’ll have a transitional meeting with her current speech therapy team, the speech therapist from the school, and we’ll talk about how her IEP (Individualized Education Plan) is being transferred there.
(“Neighborhood” school is a slight misnomer for us, btw. See the map? Katherine’s “neighborhood” school is Franklin — which we know because we’re in that little rump area of “Franklin” in the lower right corner, which, as you can see, is not quite in the same neighborhood as Franklin itself. Katherine’s looking forward to taking the school bus.
At least this map shows that. In the K-transition packages we’ve been getting, that little corner of LPS isn’t even shown. Hrm.)
All in all, pretty much of a waste of time, except for one brief moment of (presumably) unintended hilarity.
While all of the elementary schools have special ed teams “resource centers,” there are a series of specific, more intensive programs that are housed at different schools. So the program for kids who need special care because of hearing disabilities is at one school, a few schools have a program specializing in academic/cognitive problems that can be handled in small groups, other schools have a program specializing in academic/cognitive problems that have to be handled one-on-one, etc.
One of the programs is called “TAB,” which stands for “Teaching Appropriate Behavior.” It’s for kids, as you might imagine, who have emotional or behavioral control problems.
The elementary school it’s headquartered at is named Moody.
Well, I thought it was funny.