Now It Gets Interesting – Lying During the Initial Meeting
I had trepidations going into the video meeting to establish whether or not the boy required Special Education Services. Sure, they were told that evaluations had already been done, with what I categorized at the time as a “haughty nose in the air as if we were know-nothings.”
Sidenote: I've been doing Individual Education Plans ("IEP") for close to forty years for my sons, the Grandson and other Foster Kids. That doesn't make me an expert but it has given me a lot of experience in what to look for - and how to look for things that are missing.There was one thing that both TMEW and I were going to stand on, and we told DCYF and CASA – we were NOT going to provide transportation to and from Barnstead. A 40-minute drive down to deliver him to preschool, another 40-minute drive back home, and then repeat that process for the end-of-preschool pickup. I made it clear to DCYF and our District that if Barnstead would tuition him into our District for preschool and SpecEd, I’d happily do the transport, as the school is just 5 minutes from our home; easy-peasy.
At the end of their evaluation, they agreed that services were warranted. However, they huffed and puffed that tuitioning to our District was not in their cards, as they had their own pre-school program curriculum; they’d provide Special Ed services as well.
And then they said something I didn’t expect to hear – they would provide transportation.
Remember that point: The Bait.
Now It Gets Interesting – Lying by Omission in Draft IEP: Stage 1
So, we waited…and waited…and waited more for the draft IEP. To the point that I let DCYF know that this has taken too long and I was about to complain to the NH Dept of Education. Just after that, Barnstead sent it out. We got it, but only through [loser] Dad. After all, we were only the Foster Parents (e.g., it was made clear that we were of no matter to them).
Remember that point: If you don’t play nice with others...
I specifically made it clear to all on our Team that Dad was NOT to sign it and send it back to the District. That would have cast it into concrete. I had already quickly glanced through it and saw a number of errors and flat-out lies in their proposed IEP draft. Before making it official, I wanted to make sure that we all knew what the District was planning to do and go line by line.
I started to write a couple of extensive emails to The Team outlining what I was seeing:
- Caught them with multiple sloppy cut-and-pastes that made it clear they were being lazy by “stealing” either from other kids’ IEPs or just using pre-written boilerplate that they’d use for everyone.
- They made claims, in writing, that “he plays well with other children” when it was clear from the NE Family Services watch that he was the only child present during the evaluation.
I was halfway through documenting the IEP’s problems and outright lies and was sending out a number of partial updates to DCYF, CASA (the legal person representing the best interest of the child in court, and the NE Family person who oversaw Dad’s supervised visits (and who was a former SpecEd teacher). The goal was to have everyone on the team know what a horrible job had been done on this – metaphorically, think copy/paste, “happy, happy” jargon, and just slapping stuff down, rubbing their hands together, and exclaiming, “what a great job we did and the parents will never know“.
But he signed it anyway. Which made it legal and binding. That also locked in all the stupidity I had already found, and the things I found later. Barnstead took great delight in the fact that their trap had been set…and tripped.
Now It Gets Interesting – Lying by Omission in the Draft IEP: Stage 2
And then Barnstead decided to make it even harder by pulling what I call “The Used Car Salesman Bait and Switch Stage 1“. By this I mean stating one thing (“we’ll provide student transport” during the initial meeting) – but not specifically putting it into the Related Services section of the IEP.
And if it ain’t in the IEP, it doesn’t exist. It was all about the money for them. For me, like the previous 18 years beforehand, it was all about holding petty bureaucrats accountable twice over.
If they didn’t like me now, they certainly didn’t like me later on during the next video meeting.
Continued in Part 4…it gets even more revealing and interesting.
