New Challenges mean new learnings!

...  It All Falls in a Heap!  But there are things to learn from failure...  (One of my favourite sayings)

Well this is one of those posts that is part rant, part sharing some learning's.  Since my last post we have had some great positives but this post is based on the last challenging week.... 

So to some background and a little rant.  After a few hiccups at Seraphin's 2015 school we decided to change schools for the last term.  The first term at the new school went swimmingly.  The school implemented all the tools we discussed including the bracelet strategy and a some devices used for comfort and listening to music (including some headphones that she wore everywhere, mainly around the neck).   Due to this team work she felt comfortable and had a reasonably good term 4 in 2015 making a couple of new friends and flying ahead in academics. Things were looking fantastic....

The new school year started and things were looking great again.   Famous last words.... A new teacher had started at the school.  The problem being that the teacher wasn't aware of a number of tools implemented the previous year as comfort mechanisms such as the headphones and music.  Unfortunately the teacher tried to take the items from Seraphin and well those with any experience in our world would know what happened next...  Suffice it to say, Seraphin is no longer at the school, 2 weeks into the new school year.  Now, dont get me wrong I don't blame the teacher, I did at first, although after some investigation we found that the comfort items were not listed in the individual learning plan (ILP).  She wasn't to know, but was this fair for Seraphin?

Now I'm not going to answer that question in the post as you can well imagine what we think the answer is.  I would to discuss the learning's that we as parents took from this experience.

Get a copy of your childs ILP.  Don't expect the school to send you a copy.  Demand a copy to ensure it is kept up to date.

Ensure the ILP is kept up to date.  Again don't expect the school to keep it up to date.  We had found that school B was using information from an assessment completed 4 years prior not actual information given via email or verbally by the parents.  We also found that they didn't update Seraphin's ILP until after the incident that caused the school to ask us to withdraw her.

Include Your Professional Support in the plan.  One thing we had trouble grappling with at the start was allowing the school to contact our child's support services for guidance.  Unfortunately this does seem to be required.  We have found that if schools do not specifically have information and strategies written by professionals they wont implement it.  Why not trust parents?  I guess our advice as parents doesn't cover them for insurance/litigation.

Now a question to the readers.  Is home schooling an option?

Thanks for reading. 

Materia