I should count my blessings. My daughter’s selective mutism/anxiety isn’t life threatening. Her behavioral problems at home, while making life uncomfortable at times, has it’s ups and downs. Things aren’t terrible. The future isn’t dismal. She will have trouble with anxiety probably all her life, but we will work on that.
Last year, she didn’t speak one word out loud in class. I think she whispered to the teacher once.
She’s in two different preschools now. She is in a special needs classroom two days a week, and a regular community preschool three days a week. She is actually making some progress.
In her special needs classroom, something just clicked for her. Within 4 days, she was speaking normally. I don’t know what it was. Perhaps it was the fact that there is a lot more sensory play, perhaps it was the trampoline (I think the Out of Sync Child Has Fun book said it stimulates the language parts of the brain or something like that).
Even in her regular classroom, she has made partial progress. She is whispering to the teacher when called upon. She isn’t really interacting with the other kids, hasn’t made any friends. There are 10 kids in the classroom, and there is a lot of background noise since they have 30 kids in one large room, but separated by partitions. You always hear the other two classes going on.
But, no one from the S/N classroom has done any observations. No one from the S/N program has contacted the regular preschool even though it EXPLICITLY states they are supposed to provide consultations.
The thing is, the teacher a few weeks ago was going to go for an observation on a day they had teacher in-service and school wasn’t in session. Only they couldn’t because my daughter’s class was on a field trip that day.
So, here it is 2 months into school, there is some progress, but not much at the regular needs preschool.
I sent in a dvd of her at her other preschool and how she reacted at her ballet class when they were going to perform for the parents a week ago Monday (normally she participates just fine. When it came time to perform for us, my daughter just stood there through two performances trying not to cry). It was only 18 minutes long. I wanted to give it to her before the P-T conference.
She never looked at it yet. I had my dh bust his butt getting it done, adding comments on it so I could send it into the teacher before P-T conferences. We even had 2 days off due to Fall break. And never once she looked at it.
She said she won’t look at it until after P-T conferences.
That royally peeves me off, because we can’t have any meaningful conversations without it.
I’m upset, because they see she’s doing just fine in their classroom, but they seem to not care that she’s still having issues in other areas of her life. They originally told us she could have 5 days a week in their classroom, now they are saying they never offered that to begin with. My mother was there and she remembers it (my dh, doesn’t remember exactly what they said, but he does remember we wanted her in at regular preschool 3x a week). I don’t have it in my notes, either, only because we (dh and I) decided from the get-go that we wanted her in her regular classroom as much as possible. But I was under the impression she’d get help while she was there too, from the IEP. Right now, she is not getting squat.
And even when I made it easy for her to have an “observation”, the teacher doesn’t even do that.
I wonder if we have another case conference and find out exactly who’s responsible for helping or at least communicating with her other school?
I wonder if I just shut up and be grateful she’s making partial progress?
Raising Smart Girls 