School meetings

Well, this week we meet with our local Special Education school people to find out about getting Ying enrolled into a school for the hearing impaired. We have been at such a loss as to what to do about Ying's speech that one day a few months ago we decided to go to a school that specialized in teaching speech to children with hearing loss of all levels. Basically we had seen the school while driving around town and just called and made an appointment to get a tour of the place. It was great! 5 days a week, 8-3-ish type schedule, and it was all geared around teaching speech and listening skills. The director told us that in many cases the local school systems would pay for the contract for the children too, so it would be at no cost for us. We were already doing 1 hour a week at the local elementary school, but that wasn't really enough, and she wasn't particularly getting the attention she needed, we feel its because she wasn't a full-time student. We assumed that it would be easy enough to find out one way or the other if they would pay for Ying's contract, but we were WRONG. I've never had any bad experiences with 'the system' I suppose, although I've never had to deal with it on any level I particularly cared about. When this whole process started we thought it would be fairly smooth and simple, but just getting people on the phone or returning emails is almost impossible. It got to the point that we were sending emails and/or calling our contact person everyday for about a month and wouldn't hear ANYTHING. AND we knew she was actually in the office, physically sitting in her office BTW, because her admin would confirm it for us when we called. We finally contacted the school superintendent and he responded back promptly, and let us know someone would work on it. Wouldn't you know it, within 2 days we had a letter in the mail from the school with an appointment setup. This still irritated us a bit for a few reasons. They are supposed to contact us and work out a time when we can do the meeting, but instead the just sent us a letter with a date on it. Oh yea! It also didn't have a time listed, and had grammatical errors all over it. Everything we ask about usually is dodged or responded to with a very vague and uncommitted response. Us: "Can Ying get a paid contract to go to this special school for children with hearing loss?", School: "Yes, Ying qualifies for speech" <--------WTF, that is not what I asked. I can ask a cashier at Walmart to talk to her and they can confirm that she qualifies for speech. At this point I'm under the belief that maybe the Special Education department in my school district is in fact run by mentally handicapped people, maybe some kind of equal opportunity employment thing, I dunno.

So we have a meeting Thursday that we THINK is going to confirm if we get to send  Ying to the private school. They also invited the director from the private school to the meeting, so we are assuming that means we are going to be going over enrolling her there, but there is no telling with these people.  I'm hoping all goes well, otherwise I may be flipping tables and threatening legal action. Robyn will probably have to send me out of the room so I don't get too crazy.