Tuesday Full'a Nutthin'

My day really began when I attended a staffing this morning.  The major question of eligibility for this particular student was muddied by the fact that there had been major interruptions in their schooling.  With that being the case, the student shouldn't be eligible for special education services since, legally, that becomes an issue since this may constitute an effect of environmental, cultural, or economic disadvantage.  The catch is that if the student isn't eligible then they won't get the services they need for remediation if it is due to inconsistent schooling.

Among the other highlights of the day: we were given the new Special Education Medicaid Initiative service logs.  On the upside, the forms are easier to fill out than the previous ones.  More of a check off thing than having to really write stuff.  On the downside, the new forms were only available as a PDF as opposed to the previous forms which were a Word document.  So now I couldn't type my forms up.

Do you know what you get when you prevent a geek from being able to complete things in the way that he wants?  You get an angry geek with a mission.  After several attempts to convert the documents with free online PDF to Word document conversion websites, I finally downloaded a free trial of higher grade program which got the job done.  I know I could have checked to see if our district had the full version of Adobe Acrobat but the turnaround time of finding out this information and actually getting access to it would have been stress inducing.  And turning the PDF into a form would have been a time consuming, manual process.  This program converted the form pretty instantaneously into a Word document that could be used right away.

Finally, I got together with one of my Spanish speaking coworkers and called a parent to see about making a change in a student's program.  So I have some paperwork lined up for me to do tomorrow, as well as a need to arrange some meeting dates.

Two more days of work left this week.  Friday is the big NJASP conference.  I'm looking forward to seeing some old friends and former coworkers.  If anyone reading this is going, let me know.