Today’s blog posting is a happy one and I want to start off by talking about a Beatles song (which is something I have not done for quite some time). Sir Paul wrote at least five songs for his wife Linda and I will was the first. It is a very simple song (one of the shortest in the catalog), but it quite remarkable in both style and composition. It perhaps showed the world what was yet to come from McCartney.
I was looking for my post title and I re-read the lyrics to this wonderful song, and I the bridge really sums up my feelings about Avi.
Love you forever and forever
Love you with all my heart
Love you whenever we’re together
Love you when we’re apart
Today Avi is coming home. Now this one is for real, Marsha will probably go pick him up this afternoon and I will see him when I get home from work. He has had some tough times in the past few days, but he is much better than he was a month ago. In a day or so he will return to Nu View academy (more on this in a moment) and he will also have a few evaluations over the next few days to see if he can qualify for OT and Speech. We believe he needs this, and if he does not “qualify” we will have to fight for them anyway.
On Friday we had our IEP meeting which was held at Nu View. At the meeting were our case manager from Highland Park, her Boss, the principle of Nu View, Avi’s teacher from Nu View, his therapist from Nu View, the psychiatrist from Nu View, us and a good friend who is a psychologist working with high functioning ASD kids and helping us as an advocate. Big group! The meeting went basically as I had assumed. They all feel that Nu View is the right placement for Avi, even though we do not feel the same. The psychiatrist there was very reluctant to accept an ASD diagnosis and a good portion of the meeting was some arguing about diagnosis. Diagnosis in and of itself is not a major issue for us, however, the ASD label opens doors that are not open with just ED (emotionally disabled) which is how Avi is officially classified. If we cannot get an autism classification, we will try for MD (multiple disabled), but this was not discussed on Friday and we are going to work on our school district.
They did agree to add into the new IEP that Avi will be evaluated and if he qualifies for the therapies they will be part of the IEP. They also will add that they will search for other possible placements. We have not decided if we are going to accept the IEP or if we are going to fight it outright, but we will decide soon. It happens that our friend who came to the meeting with us recommended a school which is not too far called The Newmark School. After some research through an organization called Aspen Marsha found that their top school in our area for kids with high functioning Autism is the Newmark School. We are going to fight to have Avi moved to this school as soon as we can.
I don’t know what the future is going to hold for us, but I do know that we are getting back onto our Long and Winding Road from this little detour. Avi is on new medications and hopefully with the right therapies and the right school we will see positive change.