Last week, Caydence was officially diagnosed with OCD. Not as a correction to something we thought was happening. Not as a clarification of anxiety we already knew existed. But as an addition, stacked on top of ADHD combined type, generalized anxiety disorder, and school-based anxiety that we’ve been managing for years. I want to say…
This article focuses on New York, where the Committee on Special Education, or CSE, is the team responsible for determining special education eligibility and developing, reviewing, or revising a student’s IEP. In New York City, many public school IEP meetings take place at the child’s school, while district CSE meetings commonly serve students attending private,…
There’s a shelf in my son’s closet that only holds one kind of thing: sweatshirts in the same color, folded the same way. No collars anywhere in there. No buttons. Nothing with a cuff that grips the wrist. If you didn’t know him, you might call it a phase, or picky, or a kid being…
You’ve requested the evaluation. You’ve documented everything in writing. You’ve built your binder, whether by hand or with help. Now comes the moment all of that preparation has been building toward: the IEP meeting itself. I remember my first one vividly, walking into a room full of professionals who all seemed to know each other,…
There is a very specific exhaustion that comes from being a special needs parent in public, and it has nothing to do with your actual child. It’s the running commentary from strangers, and sometimes family, who mean well, or think they do, and hand you their unsolicited opinion anyway. Some of it is sweet and…
By the time you’ve requested an evaluation and started documenting everything in writing, you’re going to have paper. Lots of it. Evaluations, emails, IEP drafts, report cards, therapy notes, correspondence with the district. Without a system, all of that lives scattered across your inbox, a kitchen drawer, and your own memory, which is exactly where…
ADHD and anxiety show up together far more often than most people realize, and once you understand why, it stops looking like a coincidence and starts looking like a trap. Research puts the overlap somewhere between 25 and 50% of people with ADHD also meeting criteria for an anxiety disorder, with some studies of adults…
Once you’ve submitted your written request for an evaluation, you’re going to be writing a lot of emails. This is just the truth of special education advocacy: email becomes your primary language with the district, and how you write those emails matters almost as much as what you’re asking for. I learned this slowly, through…
A 504 plan can be exactly the right fit for one child and completely insufficient for another, and understanding why starts with understanding what it actually is. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was the first civil rights law in the United States to prohibit discrimination against people with disabilities in any program…
Somewhere along the way, you started noticing things. Maybe it was your child’s teacher mentioning a concern at pickup. Maybe it was your own gut telling you something wasn’t adding up, the meltdowns after school, the way homework turned into an hour-long battle, the way your child seemed to be working twice as hard as…
