120 days...

Until my baby turns three and starts school, so saith the meeting I attended today. We had our very first meeting with the school district today, aptly referred to as a 120 day meeting. It was mostly an exchange of paperwork on both sides. I was given information about the process and the programs, and in turned I offered up a cursory review of all things KayTar.

The coordinator for the district was friendly enough, she reviewed the remainder of the process before placement and then reviewed the various levels of placement within the district. I didn't have a couple pieces of paperwork on hand, so I'll have to run those by next week. Once those are handed off, we will schedule a cursory evaluation, probably for November, and from there they will decide if an intensive evaluation is necessary. The placement levels range from speech therapy once or twice a week to three hour/five day per week special education preschool. The mid-range placements include intensive language labs for longer time periods twice per week and community-based preschool. The community-based preschool is housed in area preschools with district appointed special-ed teachers in the classroom. The classes house six special needs children and twelve typically developing children. The classroom ratio is between 6:1 or 5:1 in those classrooms. The special-ed preschool program has a ratio of 3:1.

I gave a quick, concentrated overview of KayTar's weaknesses and medical hoopla. I feel really quite capable when discussing her delays, because I know them intimately. However, the medical issues are always fun to discuss because it is filled with so many gaps and "I don't really know what's going on." I get to say intelligent sounding things like:

"She has these drop attacks where she is just laid flat out. It might be dizziness or it might be seizures. We don't know."

"She has these things we call 'eye deviations' where her eyes roll up and over in her head and stay for a few seconds, then they come back down. Yeah, they might be seizures, but we don't know. We're still waiting on EEG results from last month. Wait, I mean TWO months ago now."

"Well, she might be having migraines OR seizures, or migraines AND seizures, or maybe one night Migraine and Seizure had a little too much to drink, put on a little Barry White, got carried away, and made a lovechild in her brain. We don't know."

"So to sum up, WE DON'T KNOW."

Good times! It is always nice to be reminded how little we actually know. Very refreshing. Based on our conversations, I have a feeling that if KayTar qualifies for placement in a classroom (and I hope she does, because she needs it), I think she would likely end up in the 5 day program, because I believe those teachers are the most equipped to deal with the medical side of her case. This is just my feeling and not representative of anything that was hinted to on their part, all of that will wait until the evaluations have been done. This meeting was fairly quick and easy, KayTar didn't even need to be present. The next meeting will probably take place sometime in November and we'll go from there.

Can it really be time for this tiny pink peanut to start school?