Five days before school starts...

I’m not impressed with our school system right now.

In fact, I’m furious and frustrated.

 

School starts on Tuesday.  This shouldn’t surprise anybody.

 

We had a meeting back at the end of April to discuss all the needs that had to be met for Caelan to attend school.  In attendance at that meeting was the Principal, the Kindergarten Teacher, two Early Childhood Educators from the school, CCAC, a Blind-Low Vision Representative for the school board, a Teacher of the Deaf from the school board, his Education Assistant from the Kindercare Preschool Program, and a Representative from the Community and Social Services Program of Prescott-Russell.  Sounds like a pretty all encompassing list, doesn’t it?

At this meeting it was determined, among many other things:

1. That Caelan would require a Nurse (provided by CCAC) at school with him all day to monitor his trache as well as administering his feed in the middle of the day

2. That Caelan would require a full time Educational Assistant assigned specifically to him (provided by the School Board)

3. That Caelan would require special transportation and that the nurse would accompany him to and from school.

 

Today is Thursday.  Let’s review these three basic points once again, four months later.

1.  Nursing.  We’ve received a phone call from a specific agency advising that they’ve been given the contract and are able to fill it.  Umm.  Great.  That Nurse hasn’t contacted us to meet Caelan or learn about his day.  This doesn’t instill much confidence in me given that school is supposed to start in 5 days.  We do know through our night Nurse that the assigned Nurse has been in contact with her.  Just to note, that our night Nurse has never looked after Caelan during the day.  Caelan’s care overnight and during the day differ considerably.  We’ve also found out that it will be the assigned Nurse’s husband who will be driving her out to our house and picking her up at the end of the day.  This concerns us because it adds one more person for us to rely on to get Caelan to school.  Regardless of all this hearsay, the bottom line is that she hasn’t contacted us to meet Caelan and that worries me. A lot.

2.  Educational Assistant.  We learned this morning that apparently the person who initially was slotted to be Caelan’s EA has retired.  Yet, the posting for this position doesn’t close until next Wednesday (one day after school starts?) and it won’t be until after that time that a decision will be made.  In the interim there will be an emergency EA in place.

3.  We received a phone call last week inquiring as to whether Caelan required a booster seat or a car seat for transportation but there were no other details available at that time regarding when pick up would occur.  We haven’t heard any details regarding transportation for Caelan back and forth to school.  We need these details to pass on to the Nurse so she knows what time to be at our house for pick up.  When we were able to speak to someone at the school today we were advised that they don’t know anything about transportation times and that the transportation company should be in contact with us.  No timeline was provided, however, on their website I discovered that we should receive the phone call by Saturday night.

 

THEN… Because I wasn’t already frustrated and stressed out enough…  We receive a call this morning from the Kindergarten Teacher advising that they’d like to delay Caelan’s start of school to Friday.  They would like a meeting at 8am on Friday morning to discuss Caelan’s needs and requirements in the classroom.

 

– you know that sound as you drag the needle across the record player... the sound that indicates and interruption of  your thoughts…  and yes, totally dating myself.

 

HUH??

 

Isn’t that exactly what we did four months ago???

 

Needless to say we have a little boy all excited about starting school who is going to be very disappointed when his sisters get on that big yellow bus and he’s not scheduled to go anywhere! 

 

What if we had made arrangements for Damian to go right back to work as soon as school started?  Fortunately or not, I guess we had the foresight to realize that we shouldn’t have that much faith in our school system.  We knew there’d be hiccups, but I never thought to this extent.  I’m just really disappointed and quite honestly I’ve lost a lot of trust. 

 

Oh and they want Damian to stick around that first day too.

 

Well guess what? We had already put that plan in to action earlier this week when we still hadn’t heard from our mystery Nurse.

 

We’ve contacted the nursing agency and CCAC and voiced all our concerns.  CCAC doesn’t understand either.  They even reminded us that back at that initial meeting it was suggested that Caelan have an introductory day to kindergarten on the 29^th or sometime this week which is something else that apparently fell through the cracks because we never heard anything further about it.  It would have been beneficial to have had that earlier visit into the classroom where if we had any concerns they could have been addressed before the start of school.  Instead his start of school gets delayed.  I just don’t get how things could be this disorganized when I thought we had everything planned.

 

“Best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

 

Damian decided to contact the School Trustee for our area and voiced our concerns and frustrations. 

 

 

Then things started rolling...

Guess what?

We got a call from the Principal and suddenly an EA has been assigned.  The EA and the kindergarten teacher would like to come visit Caelan on Thursday morning for an assessment.

 

The Nurse left a message to contact her later this afternoon.  She wanted to arrange a time to come meet Caelan however, she would have to call us back once she spoke with her husband to determine when would be best.  It’s been arranged that she’ll come on Saturday morning at 9am. Unfortunately, she’s already a step behind in our minds. Not the way I wanted things to start out.