This sentence from AmFam’s post earlier this week made me cry, because it’s what I am feeling right now.
My baby–this amazing kid who has already been through so much–will carry the heavy burden of my failures.
When I look back to two months ago, when I was deciding what school to choose for Gege after he was asked to leave kindergarten, I am filled with regret. In hindsight, I see all the warning signs that I ignored because I wanted so badly to like the district preschool. I thought, being the district preschool, they would better prepare him for public school kindergarten, and help us determine whether he would need more services, and help us actually GET the services, since they share a campus with the special education department. So I blinded myself to:
- the fact that they unknowingly operated without a license for most of 2010 until they got written up by the Department of Social Services. I mean, WTF? This is the district preschool. This should have clued me in to how completely disorganized they are.
- their stupid policy of not allowing teachers to hug/cuddle the children, even though I knew very well that Gege needs a ton of cuddling.
- the fact that they never gave us a list of their policies and it seemed like they made up new ones every day in order to get us to come pick him up.
I know now that the preschool staff and the special ed staff don’t communicate at all, despite their offices being across the hall from one another.
In hindsight, I wonder if I set Gege up to fail by over-preparing the school for him. I wrote out a list of his issues and how to handle each one, thinking it would help the teachers, but I think it only made them super sensitive to him acting out. It might not have just been me, because I know the kindergarten teacher talked to the preschool director about her experience with him as well. I think with all the preparation, they probably thought he was developmentally worse than he really is, if that makes sense.
Gege started a new (private) preschool today, and we plan to have Didi start there next month. Already our experience with this school is vastly better than with the district preschool. I have no one to blame but myself, because AJ wanted him to attend this school from the beginning. I wish I had listened to him. And now all I can think of is how much I’ve set Gege back by forcing him to deal with all these changes in the last 4 months (from kindergarten to district preschool to current school). Because of me, he might not be ready to start kindergarten next fall. It kills me.
I am sorry you are having such a hard time. We are kind of similar, no? I can see quite clearly how these things aren’t your fault and you were trying your best, but that probably won’t make you feel any better. All you can do is try to learn from these mistakes and be more prepared when you get ready for kindergarten in the fall. You might want to consider doing your IEP meeting in the spring with a special needs attorney. I have heard the schools are often much more responsive when there is someone there who will call them on their illegal shenanigans.
Thanks, AmFam. They’re in the middle of doing a full-on assessment, for all the things I requested (and which he wasn’t tested for when we lived in the Bay area). The next IEP meeting is in 3 weeks. Hopefully I won’t cry through the whole thing as usual.