u/jacobissimus

She’s aware. She’s on the email thread I have the the CEO and other school board members

I had an interview set up at one point, but I ended up cancelling because I was worried they’d retaliate. Maybe I should have gone through with it, but they are intimidating people

Hey, I remember and thanks for your help before—honestly, the attention these posts get seems to be the most effective thing honestly. I’ve made a lot of great connections now around the big groups in the community, but they’re all so slammed with cases so much bigger than mine.

My hope is that if they see enough parents connect to say there needs to be clear changes to the operational practices that drop kids through these cracks, that’ll be what ends up drive change.

FWIW I did a due process filing on my own a couple years ago and it was reasonably successful. We can always connect and I can show you how I went about it without a lawyer

Yeah I keep hoping they’ll just start cooperating and I can move on with my life. Back when things were much worse I called all the groups you mentioned and some others here and there, but they are all so swamped. My case isn’t even that egregious in the grand scheme of what disabled families are going through, so we are kind of low in the triage for places like project heal and disability rights.

I’m a huge fan of the parents place workshops and resources and would 💯 recommend it to anyone who happens to be reading this thread

Dude whenever I’ve connected with parents in support groups and whatnot, even when things were much worse, it was like every parent had the same story. It’s all just business as usual for them.

I did get in touch with the CEO and other school board folks. I suspect that’s the only reason I started getting any reply at all—I’ve tried to highlight what a generalized problem this is too.

I keep thinking that if they just fix each problem as it comes up, and don’t change the communication channels, then it’ll just start over next year. At some point the process has to change

Yeah I think giving water bottles out is pretty cool, and I’m not going to say I have the picture to know whether it’s a good idea or not—really I just think it should have been announced differently and I worry about kids who won’t use accommodations when they feel singled out. Maybe it’s for the best all in all but it seems like the kind of thing that would warrant community input.

We’ve had that for a while now, but they do fail more often than you’d think, so we need the school to be able to follow a plan without them.

Our previous school wouldn’t even us it directly thought; they hired a CNA to take photos of the CGM and text them to the nurse every 15-30 min, which is pretty close to not having one at all. It’s a lot better than it used to be, but they’ll just fight about every single thing.

Oh no I haven’t. I’ve sent their Safe At School documents to the district a few times, but never thought about reaching out to them directly.

We have a 504 that’s never been implemented and have been going through the super slow process of requesting an IEP.

I appreciate the offer but I doubt there’s someone I’m not already I touch with—at least not in touch with their counterparts in the district offices.

Outside of systems programming or things where you have to be able to visualize the resulting binary shape—there’s the portability. All languages know the C abi, so if you want to provide something to connect to a FFI that’s a ton easier, or if you want to target arbitrary architectures.

Yes, and if you’re in Baltimore city, also remind your school that when they cancel their 15 min recess they are violating policy ADF-RB

Our district will never follow federal or state law, let alone their own policy. But at least they should be ashamed of it

My experience has been that schools are just hostile to families of disabled kids by default and I wish that I had gone in knowing that they weren’t going to cooperate.

Now I document every single interaction I have with them. Everything is by email, or summarized immediately in an email. I record all the meetings. I wish I’m had done that from day one.

It’s incredibly exhausting and it’s turned me into someone I don’t want to be, but my kid is having a much better experience because of it.

I’m now in a position where can afford an advocate, but that is pretty expensive. I also now just know to assume almost everything they say is a lie—like they gave me some ABC data recently for a behavioral assessment, but when I checked the dates, most of them were weekends. You just have to fact check everything.

For the IEP meeting, they have to give you a meeting within 30 days by federal law, but I think only if you ask in writing. So if you email instead of talking to the teacher on the phone they will be obligated to give you a meeting and if they don’t agree to the changes, they have to give you a written explanation about why.

I just wish schools were not hostile by default

I used the Safeway on Boston for a long time and generally liked it, but ended up moving everything to the outpatient pharmacy in Johns Hopkins on Orleans because they had things even during shortages. It’s inconvenient to go through the hospital every time, but I get what I need more consistently

My big concern is how sudden it is, along with how different the automated call announcement and letter all. At least at my office, we would never do a policy change like this without having a public comment period. I don’t know everything about what goes into a decision like this, and I’m not going to say I disagree with it per se, but I have questions and some worries about the details. I think parents should have had an opportunity to ask questions and provide feedback before it went into effect.

As a parent, all my attempts to be involved in my kid’s school life have been met with a lot of hostility. Most of my emails get ignored, even when they are about pretty serious safety concerns. Whenever I hear the idea that parents should be more involved or are somehow responsible for the general decline in literacy and test scores, I wonder how much of that comes from parents who have just finally given up after being treated the way I’ve been.

Yeah with only 15 min of recess, when they have it, I’m sure they’re bouncing off the walls to move around

They did get longer, they are down to just 15 min of recess—but even that is frequently cancelled. We are talking about elementary school, so lunch and recess are the only breaks from class. There’s no transition from class to class.

In our case it’s for diabetes, but I’m sure water access is a necessary accumulation for lots of medical conditions

I’m actually not able to move to another district right now.

I mean, our schools are already routinely withholding medical care. It’s probably a good idea to be suspicious.

I’m worried about my kid not using her water accommodations because it’ll single her out more. I’m also worried about the way it was announced, with such a big difference between the voice announcement and the letter, as well as just not being open to comment.

I’m also generally worried about this in the context of other things going on: they’re doing attendance competitions between classes which also highlights disabled kids and frames them as losing a prize that their class would have won. They cancel recess pretty frequently, which district policy says they’re not allowed to do.

So, again I’m not sure I would even disagree with this policy if I could ask questions about it, but it’s an event in a greater story that makes me worried about it.