Back To School Prep

Back to school time!  With that comes clothes shopping, buying supplies, and figuring out all the steps of reacclimating your child to school.

Every year we plan visits prior to school starting for Brian to see his new classroom, meet his new teacher, and peruse the halls without any other children there.

I meet privately with the new special ed teacher (yes, new, as the role seems to be as cursed as the Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts in the Harry Potter books) and explain all the Ins and Outs of Brian.

And every August I update the document I made years ago, "Unlocking the Puzzle of Brian".

I have a number of personal "friends" going into Kindergarten this year with the autism diagnosis and a lot of questions from their parents about what they need to do.  Some would say my document is a bit lengthy or a bit bossy....however, over the years I have learned that I can't merely trust that the professionals in my child's life will understand the intricacies of autism.  I need to put it all out there, no matter how obvious I think it may be.

So far I haven't seemed to get any attitude about it (unless it's behind my back) and I've had outside evaluators comment in their evaluations that they had an excellent, thorough document given to them (mine).  I copy this every year and give it to EVERYONE on Brian's team- another thing I've learned through the years- you can't trust that they will all share information with each other.  So one goes to the ed tech, the special ed teacher, the regular ed teacher, the OT, the speech therapist, etc.

I'm including the link today for the document I made last year.  It's not updated for this school year yet as I'm a procrastinator and will probably be working on it the night before the first day of school. As I'm reading it I'm happily realizing he has made a lot of progress this past year, another bonus of having a yearly document.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-io0njsv9jJZFhTb09nVVp6ZU0/edit?usp=sharing

I'm hoping this link will help some of those just starting this journey of autism and public education.  If you've already been there and done that, what works for you and your family?