Who has to be in the room. What you’re allowed to ask for. Whether you can say no to something the school proposes. These are the questions parents bring to us most often before an IEP or 504 meeting, and most of them don’t get answered until the meeting is already underway. If your child […]
Few things are harder to watch than your child standing just outside a group of kids, clearly wanting in, with no idea how to make that happen. It’s not a motivation problem. It’s usually a missing skill, specific enough that once it’s taught, it tends to click fast. Social skills strategies are built around finding […]
Most school concerns get solved in a two-minute conversation at pickup. Some do not. When you have raised the same issue three times and nothing on paper has changed, you are past the point where a friendly note will fix it, and you need to know what the system gives you. This is a walk-through […]
There are two very different things a Colorado family can mean when they say their child receives special education services. In a public school, it means an individual entitlement to a free appropriate public education, documented in an IEP, with procedural protections that include the right to disagree and appeal. In a private school of […]
Six weeks of ten minutes twice a day comes to about seven hours. That is less time than one bad week of homework arguments in October, and it is close to the only real leverage a parent gets before a school year starts. Those seven hours go furthest when they are spent on three things: […]
First weeks are often deceptively fine. Everything is new, the novelty carries a child through, and staff are watching closely because they are watching everyone closely. Week two is when the schedule tightens, the attention thins out, and whatever was being held together stops being held. So if you are trying to predict how this […]
A three-year-old bites his sister every time she takes a turn on the tablet. A four-year-old hits her teacher whenever it’s time to line up for recess. Neither one is a bad kid, and neither one is doing this on purpose in the way that word usually implies. Aggression in young autistic children is common, […]
I don’t think of kindergarten readiness as a finish line, and at Achieve ABA Therapy Group, I try to talk families out of thinking of it that way too. It’s closer to a head start: the more skills your child walks in with, the less ground everyone has to make up once the year is […]
I still remember the first time a family in Greeley called me in a panic because their son had slipped out the back door while everyone was busy with dinner. He was found twenty minutes later, three houses down, standing at the edge of a neighbor’s koi pond. Nothing happened to him that day. But […]
A mother I worked with recently in Boulder told me she could not remember the last time she used the bathroom without someone knocking on the door. She wasn’t looking for advice. She needed someone to hear it and take it seriously. Autism parent burnout is real, and it comes up in conversations like that […]
