Therapy

We had our yearly meeting with the county to formulate a plan for John's schooling. This time we brought our case worker just in case she could offer any advice. John was in a horrible mood so Yoshie and I had to take turns listening to the meeting and entertaining John.
Everyone is very nice, but they only have so much money to work with so it's a bit of a struggle to get all of the services that you think your child deserves. This time, we had learned that kids with autism were receiving far more aid than John had been getting. So, we were hoping to fight for equal services as the autistic kids. Turns out that it really isn't an option.
We had to go through all of John's goals for the previous year. He hadn't met many of his goals at all, so a lot of them just got carried over to this year. We did get rid of the 1 on 1 nurse, as that was simply overkill and unneeded at this point. In a perfect world, we would trade the nurse for a 1 on 1 aide or speech therapist. Of course, it doesn't work that way. When Yoshie told them 15 minutes a week of speech was highly inadequate, we were informed that this is actually a LOT. When we pressed them on why the autistic kids got more than this, they admitted it all had to do with funding. I said that we could get John an autistic label if it would help, but they convinced me that this probably wouldn't be a good class for John. A lot of their curriculum wouldn't apply to him, and I doubt he'd be able to thrive in a structured atmosphere like that anyway. In any case, an autism label from a doctor wouldn't make any difference, as the county does their own analysis and they've already said John wouldn't qualify. Our case worker told us later that we should avoid an autism label anyway if at all possible for insurance reasons.
In the end, I think everyone agreed that we should pursue more private speech therapy, especially since my insurance will cover a lot of it. Some didn't think John could handle it, but we know better. They still haven't seen John's potential because he isn't on his best behaviour at school. Their point was that we need to keep bringing John to the school so that he becomes comfortable there. I think it is a valid argument.
So, we ended up keeping John in the same class which he will attend twice a week for 2 hours.
Yoshie asked them to videotape the class and give us copies of the work that they do so that we can extend their teachings at home.
We made sure that they knew what to do in case of a big seizure. They did. And, we made sure that we could re-visit his therapy options if his conditions change at all. Legally, we have the right to request a meeting at any time.