Department Meeting Day

This will be a fairly short entry.

Friday is our usual day for department meetings.  I get into work and have about an hour and a half before the meeting starts, so I head over to the high school to see the principal about the student from yesterday's entry.  The meeting goes well.  I admit to not taking all the stakeholders into account and assuming too much.  The principal plays it off as not big deal since the nature of the situation was unusual.  And that is that.

Back at the office, I check my email and do some paperwork.  I get a schedule for several initial referral conferences and dutifully put them on my calendar.  Then it is meeting time.

During the meeting we discuss mandatory trainings before moving onto staff and building issues.  And suddenly there is the first risk assessment of the year.  One of the other staff that knows the family of the student gets chosen for it.  But really, we didn't make it past the first week without a risk assessment?  Really?

Meanwhile back at the meeting, we are talking about building issues, such as secretarial staff preventing us from using photocopiers in the schools, scheduling issues, distributing IEPs, etc.  Really light and trivial stuff.  We run out of time because the room we meet in is used as the lunch room for the alternative program and the students are on the way down.  So it is an early lunch for us.  My office mate has to leave early for personal reasons and asks me if I could follow up on something for her.  I call the audiologist that did an evaluation on one of our students to ask if there is a model of FM system that they would recommend.  There isn't.  I'm told that the student needs it for amplification for a central auditory processing problem and not for hearing loss.  So I then take a look at the models that are in use in our district to identify the most reasonably priced model.

After eating and such,  we are back in the meeting.  Here is where we learn about the goings-on of the county directors meeting.  We talk about about Naples schools, which are private schools aren't certified as special education schools but take special ed students.  The hang up is the amount of paperwork that needs to be completed by the district and then signed by the commissioner of education.  In other words, a hassle and a to be avoided unless absolutely necessary.

We also hear about the changes that are occurring in the county educational services commission, many of them that are beneficial, such as contract with other public district to house programs, which provides a greater opportunity for least restrictive environment.

Finally, we hear about other districts approaches to going paperless and the issues that they have had and that we are struggling with.  Many districts, ours included, hope to be paperless by next school year.

After the meeting, I go back to my office and spend the rest of the day doing paperwork.  Well, 5 days down, 177 days to go.  Have a good weekend!