We’re gonna look like bots

Women are so cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and cute and…

Dogs love pumpkin. Dogs love cinnamon.

I actually know none of that. I was eating dinner with my spouse.

Do you have a medical diagnosis for autism or ADHD or just school diagnosis?

A “developmental delay” is only eligible for special ed under that category until a kid’s 10th birthday.

If you can, getting a medical diagnosis for autism makes other services available even outside school (see kidswaivers.org). Doing so can be difficult both in cost and in the backlog of neurobehavioral health clinics that do autism diagnosis. You would probably need a referral from the kid’s GP/pediatrician.

You can get more services on an IEP than a 504. If your kid needs individualized instruction they need an IEP. Either way your kid will have special protections when it comes to disciplinary action. A school can not academically disciple (suspend, expell, ot remove from the classroom, or e.g. not allow to attend full day vs half day) a disabled student for more than 10 school days in total over the course of a school year without holding a “manifestation to termination meeting” to determine if the behavior is a manifestation of the disability. If it is the school has to implement behavior intervention programs instead of disciplinary action.

If they ask you to come pick up your kid early that constitutes “suspension or removal from the classroom”. If that happens keep track of the number of days, and use those words talking to administrators.

I don’t know if those rules apply to preschool and kindergarten, but they should if kindergarten is mandatory in your state.

School district are also required to attempt to identify children with disabilities living in their district prior to enrollment in a process called “child find”. This is to provide early intervention programs, like developmental preschool.

It’s extremely distribing that your son was excluded from preschool due to a disability. I would be considering talking to a lawyer if I were in your place, at least seeking out the advice of a Michigan specific advocacy group.

(I’m the spouse of a special ed teacher, but not in Michigan. I’ve just been around this stuff for over a decade hearing it from the grad student/teacher side)

Getting a diagnosis should make it much easier for you to get appropriate IEPs, 504 plans, and services. I’m surprised they got IEPs without a diagnosis, since there are legal thresholds for a school/states to get federal funding related to IDEA (more on that later)

It sounds like your local schools and community services are a mixed bag of how well they provide special education services. The positive things to notice are that they have

• found a way to get IEPs for your kids even without a diagnosis
• seem to be concerned with making sure they are providing education in the least restrictive environment

The extremely worrying thing is that they refused to let your youngest stay a full day last year for his first year of school. If this was because it was a kindergarten/pre-school year and the normal school day is a half day I would be less concerned about getting services in the future.

Federal laws

There’s two main federal laws that guarantee your kids get an education:

• Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973
• The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act addresses providing accommodations to students with disabilities, and guarantees they get a free and appropriate public education, and prohibits discrimination based on disabilities.

IDEA is 3-pronged. It restates a requirement for a free and appropriate public education, requires individualized special education and services for certain disabilities (IEPs), and requires that students receiving special education services do so in the least restrictive environment.

Your locale seems to be addressing some of these, but not others.

For a student to be eligible for special education under IDEA they have to qualify under one of 13 categories, one of which is autism spectrum disorder. To qualify under autism spectrum disorder requires a diagnosis, usually an outside medical diagnosis, but occasionally, if a school really cares and tries they can provide (at least here) a school-specific diagnosis based on how it is affecting education. Eligibility for special education is required for an IEP. Since your kids have IEPs the school presumably somehow found a way to qualify them even without a diagnosis. Eligibility for special education has to be reviewed once every 3 years. IEPs have to be updated annually, and they require parental participation, and parental assent (at least initially, they may not for renewals, I’m not sure).

Special education services and education for students under IDEA have to be provided in the “least restrictive environment”. This means that a student receiving special education must be getting education along with their peers as much as possible. This is supposed to provide a number of benefits like socialization with peers, exposure to grade-level curriculum, and preventing schools from sending all the students to a special ed room and ignoring them all, which is historically how many students with disabilities were treated even after many updates to IDEA. The positive interpretation of CMH saying your youngest son no longer needs their services and should stay in his normal classroom is that they are trying to make sure he gets services in the least restrictive environment.

If your school is not letting your youngest son stay for a full day they are not providing a free and appropriate education and are discriminating on the basis of disability. You are going to need to advocate for him or dispute with the school district, and are probably going to need help from an advocacy group, mediation, or lawyer. In some states the state will provide a mediator to make sure school districts comply with the special education rules, but that does not seem to be the case for Michigan.

504 plans

Section 504 is the easier of the two for a school to use to provide accommodations. For a 504 plan they only need to document two things:

1. That the student has a disability that limits a major life activity
2. That it is interfering with their education

(the second of those might not even be required)

There are many accommodations that a school can provide for autism besides individualized education, and these can be called out in a 504 plan instead of an IEP if for some reason you can’t get an IEP modified in a timely manner. Example accommodations include:

• Speech and language services
• occupational/sensory therapy
• social/time management/educational skill services (though these are more often part of an IEP)
• behavioral intervention
• Extra time on tests/homework
• Break times to unwind from sensory overload
• Noise cancelling headphones
• stress relief/fidget/sensory toys
• Quiet areas
• Anything else that would help your child that isn’t getting individualized instruction

IEPs

Individualized education plans require eligibility under one of 13 disability categories. This requires 3 things:

1. An identified disability (this can be identified as part of the eligibility process)
2. The disability must have an adverse effect on their education
3. The student must show a need for specially designed instruction

The major difference between a 504 plan and an IEP is specially designed instruction. If the student’s getting specially designed instruction, it needs to be an IEP (from the school’s point of view). This means school districts might only provide speech and language services/sensory therapy/social skills/study skills/etc. under an IEP and not under a 504 plan. An IEP can include any of the services that could also be provided under a 504 plan.

An IEP is where you are going to get help with any academic area your kid is struggling with due to a disability. For autism spectrum disorder this varies greatly between students, but that’s the point of an IEP, that it be individually designed for the student.

IEPs require an annual review and parents are entitled to participate in that process. The annual review involves updating goals and progress and what services are appropriate/need to be provided and in general modifying the plan. This means you should get to participate in what services your kids are getting in no more than a year, but there should be nothing that prevents a school from updating these at some other time if it’s appropriate and they include you/their IEP team (see the parts of the pages I linked below about “Prior Written Notice”) and learn who should be on your student’s IEP team)

Eligibility for an IEP must be re-evaluated once every 3 years. With a diagnosis for autism your kids will only need to show an adverse effect on their education and a need for specially designed instruction to remain eligible.

Michigan

I’d check out Michigan Alliance for Families for information that’s more specific to Michigan. In particular their pages on Parental Advocacy and Dispute Resolution

Other options

If your school district simply won’t provide appropriate special education services, many parents will seek out a different source of education than the school district. This can be a local charter school, an online charter school, or some other school of choice system. Beware that not every charter/school of choice system is required to provide special education services at all. Online charter schools with good special education programs get a lot of students enrolling in the school, getting evaluation, eligibility, and IEP plans, and 504 plans, and then transferring back to a brick and mortar school with documents in hand. A 504 plan from an online school will not address many in-classroom accommodations because there isn’t a physical classroom, but might still include accommodations that can be adapted to a physical classroom like being allowed to use stress relief toys during class.

I started doing that last year with Joplin on my computer and it’s a big help.

I also keep big notes to just dump everything I’m working on into - websites, pdfs, screenshots, screen video captures with no commitment to organization except I can add things in chronological order. A lot of it is initiated by showing it to someone else and then realizing I should have a note for myself too.

I really should start doing the same with personal stuff and random observations. If something is important enough to tell (or what to tell) other people about it should be important enough to tell my future self about.

It’s crazy how much not experiencing rewards yourself/the inability to do things for yourself influences things I wouldn’t even imagine before understating what ADHD is/does and consciously examining them.

I really didn’t believe that a bunch of memes on lemmy meant that I had ADHD so instead of making an appointment for it specifically I described the executive difficulties I had when making an appointment, and the doctor brought up anxiety and ADHD and depression all as things that could cause that, and that frequently go together, which they gave screening questionaires for and wanted to treat anxiety first. Then after a few weeks I had a follow-up appointment for ADHD, which was just questions about symptoms and when they first appeared.

Yeah that amounts to the same thing-report the symptoms, get diagnosis, but it felt more honest to me. I guess I really wanted to hear somebody else say it.

Diagnosis and medication for ADHD (and anxiety) was a huge benefit to me. Before I would want to do the dishes but not be able to. I’d go to the kitchen and the dishwasher would be full, so before I could do the dishes, I needed to empty the dishwasher, and before I could empty the dishwasher I needed to wash my hands and I’d get overwhelmed, not do dishes, and feel bad about it. I could empty the dishwasher if it’s what I planned on doing ahead of time, and if I started doing dishes I’d keep going stacking up dishes to wash even with the dishwasher full.

The very first day I had medication for ADHD (I’d had anxiety meds for a few weeks) I plowed through washing my hands, putting dishes away, doing dishes, went shopping for various things (I hate shopping), got winter bike pants so I could keep biking in the winter (it was already late November), and then eating dinner I got close to the end of my meal and just stopped because I didn’t want to eat anymore instead of finishing what I was eating because it’s what I was already doing.

Now when I don’t do dishes it’s because I don’t want to, not that I’m overwhelmed by it.

I still have anxiety and indecisiveness and avoidance of projects that are important to me, that somehow have my identity/ego tied up in them, or things like that. But I can do small things for myself now instead of only being able to do things for other people. Like @xmunk said it’s not solved for me, but things are much better.

Between getting treatment for ADHD and another medical condition I’ve lost about 10kg without even trying, I’m sure both treatments have contributed to it.

Besides getting medication, diagnosis is helpful because it’s easier to understand what’s happening. Even though I could tell myself “I know this isn’t normal” when I was overwhelmed or stressed out over seemingly nothing, part of me would be questioning if I wasn’t really just that lazy/inadequate. Now I know what’s going on and I still feel frustrated, and bad, but I’m more kind to myself about it.

I never even would have been able to make an appointment to get treatment if I hadn’t seen tons of ADHD memes on lemmy and realized, oh, maybe that’s not normal. Seeing people describe being on ADHD meds as easy mode and describing the things I struggled with as being hard. I saw something on facebook that said

If being hard on yourself worked, it would have worked by now.

And that really stuck with me. I also got the idea in my head that

I deserve to be able to do things for myself, not just for other people.

I also resolved before going to the appointment for ADHD that no matter what, whether that’s what I had, or I got medication, or if the medication worked, I was going to try to be kind to myself.

But I never would have even been able to make an appointment if another medical condition hadn’t escalated to literally feeling pins and needles and I made a bunch of appointments for other things when I made one for that. I didn’t make it specifically for ADHD, just some general complaint that I had some executive disorder and a description of what was happening.

EIH is probably Everyone’s Illogical Here