Indian summer ends

The first two photos are of graffiti my friend took in Detroit

The sky this morning

I watched Tess this morning as she rode the tricycle, the Ziggle, the Little Tykes cars, the balance bike...

Pretty farm on this afternoon's bike ride

So the last 4 days have been beautiful: sunny, temps in the 70s, relatively calm. I've been
trying to enjoy the weather as much as possible with long bike rides and runs. A cold front
 is coming through as I type. Wind, cold, rain....well it was nice as it lasted. We had Maya
on Monday and Tessa this morning. I tried to include as much outside time as possible.

 

Not so enjoyable was attending Maya's Individualized Educational Plan yesterday. A very
crowded room: the teacher, the school's special ed specialist, the speech therapist, the
 occupational therapist, and two different social workers along with me and the parents.
 Lots of conflicting testing results and opinions on what to do with Maya and how to
classify her. I had to fight bursting into tears versus bursting into an angry rant. I am
 sure Dont'ae and Naomi were totally confused. I believe the classroom teacher had
the best handle on the whole situation: that academically, she is average, has trouble
with fine motor skills activities and is too easily distracted which  could be a maturation
 issue or she really does have attention deficit disorder. One of these experts kept going
over the results of a test that Maya clearly didn't understand the point of. She pointed out
 that this indicated that Maya is in the 0.3%tile in intelligence, which means of a 1000 5
year olds, only 3 would perform as poorly.

 

Really, it is a miracle she could even walk and talk as that indicates she is severely
mentally handicapped. So how come she does just as well in her schoolwork as her
 classmates?

 

Another expert, to show Maya is more distracted than others timed her versus another
child matched for gender and race. Maya was focused on an activity for 50% of the
 time versus 78% for the only other African -American in the room. Proof positive
 to her that something is wrong with Maya.

 

And then they wrote that she is Emotionally Impaired. I blew up when I saw that.
 They said that was a mistake, they had no idea how that got typed in. Her sociability
 is one of her strong suits.

 

Anyway, we pointed out she is in this school only one year. We will start over
 with a different group of experts next year though the one social worker is at the
 other school too.

 

She will still get speech therapy although the therapist had a hard time articulating
the exact problem  Maya can make each individual sound and repeat a word
correctly when asked but when she speaks, she slurs many words together and
mispronounces many of them in peculiar ways.

 

I feel I need to work with her. She is making a lot of progress with her classroom
teacher so that's good.

 

We do have a date and time for the closing which isn't soon enough for me.
Yesterday, our final chore was performed. Maybe I will go and clean up after the
workmen but that will be it.