Things Not to Say at My CSE
Actually, I suppose it's my kid's CSE. I get us confused sometimes. Unhealthy? Not at all.

Anyway. New York State has a requirement that a parent member be present at CSE's and annual reviews (CSE = Committee on Special Education, known outside the Empire State as IEP meetings). So some person I've never seen before shows up at our most recent CSE, doesn't bother to introduce herself, and spends most of her time chatting up the receptionist before we walk in. WTF? I decide to be rude and say, "And you are?" as in, "Identify yourself, SHMUCK, if you're about to hear confidential information about my kid." BTW, in another post I'll talk about all the iffy FERPA-related things that I see going on around me. So she settles down a bit and starts telling me about how life gets better and she knows, she has a 10th-grader. I mean, again, WTF? She doesn't know my kid's issues. For all she knows, we're hanging on by our fingernails here. And how she wants to support the parents, which I can tell by the way she ran to chat up the receptionist after I'd identified myself as The Parent.

Sidebar: there's a protocol if you serve as a parent member on a bunch of these things. You introduce yourself. You ask if they have the reports. You say what the time frame is if you've been there and know if the meeting is running late. You make sympathetic noises in case they feel like talking ahead of time. In short, you serve as a kind of hostess or rent-a-friend before the meeting, because it sucks to sit at the Long Table. At the meeting, you are there to be supportive and to look out for the interests of the child. That's my perception, anyway: the people who trained me went into a lot of hooha about how you're not there to be a parent advocate, but if there's shit going on, I feel free to speak up. Diplomatically. Productively. But anyway. You are not there to sit on your a while confidential stuff about my kid is being said.

So anyway, I go into the meeting and she's sitting off to the side. Keep in mind that when the spousal unit and I go in, we usually have the following: a copy of NYS regulations; a binder with all of Primera's evals; several typewritten pages of questions, goals, suggestions about the most recent evaluations, etc. We added a laptop to the mix this time. So I guess we look reasonably prepared, but this piece of work did not open her mouth once, except when I brought up teaching sarcasm.

Now, here's the thing. Primera looks just great, aside from the fact that she's stunningly beautiful, which she is. She is related, she has language that falls well within normal limits, and she is at least at grade level academically. In short, for an autistic kid, she has a lot of competence. But. We didn't make up the diagnosis or the deficits: they are there. There was a National Autism Society (UK group) study commissioned a few years ago that produced incredibly dispiriting statistics on what happens even to very bright autistic people who earn college degrees. They're grossly underemployed (will dig up statistics later, but on the order of less than 15% working full-time and living on their own). These are people with the best outcomes. Job interviews, interpersonal dynamics, reading a social situation in the workplace: all landmines if you have mindblindness, don't get sarcasm, think literally, can't make complex social inferences.

But every time I bring up something like learning sarcasm, I get, "Well, lots of kids this age don't know that." Yes, and lots of them don't have autism, so they can pick it up in time. Mine won't without direct instruction. And this is the line I get from the @#$ speech pathologist, who doesn't think my kid needs services and thinks I'm malingering/have Munchausen's by proxy. And this idjit parent member says, "Oh, lots of adults I know have trouble with that, haha." Thank you, thank you, for undermining me and trivializing my concerns, when I've spent YEARS trying to understand my kid's disability and how to address it (and get the school district's professionals, whose JOB it is to address it, to do so). Bah.