Few things in life irritate me more than dealing with my son's school. My son is autistic and spends most of each day in a special ed classroom, where he (theoretically) receives instruction that is tailored to his individual needs. Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while will recall that I was seriously pissed off at the end of the last school year. I was fed up and livid and cursing in all caps (oh, and there will be just a little more of that today), because I spent all of last year fighting with the school district to get them to bring in additional (legally mandated) resources to address a problem that was interfering with my son's learning. They did nothing but stall, accuse me of being difficult and tell me that, in spite of my son's declining performance, the best people to address the problem were the classroom teachers under whom his performance was declining. Oh, no wait. How silly of me! I forgot. They actually did propose adding one additional resource to the classroom: me, as a free aide.

After a summer filled with down time, and work with one of the world's great amateur behaviorists and OTs (yes, me), my son and I worked out a solution to his problem. He started the school year and has made rapid progress in his former problem area, to the point where he no longer requires assistance. Thanks for nothing, school district.

Of course, a new problem has cropped up in a different subject. I received a note last week from his teacher stating that she was sending his classroom work home for me to finish with him, as he had not been doing his work but had been "fooling around" and "wasting time." I (very calmly) wrote back and said I'd be happy to help him at home, but shouldn't we, oh, I don't know, find out why he wasn't doing his work in class and figure out how to address it? She wrote back and very tersely said that any suggestions would be appreciated.

What?! Um, unless I'm mistaken, she's the teacher. She's the one with the degree. She's the one with the actual training in working with kids with special needs. She's the one whose job it is to figure out how to engage kids in learning and how to ensure that they behave themselves in class. Oh, and lest you say she's overworked and underpaid (which she is). She's also the one who was such a big expert, so perfectly capable of handling my son's needs herself, that she adamantly and repeatedly stated that she didn't need or want to bring in an outside specialist to help her with my son last year. But my unpaid, inexpert labor, under her direction, is, of course, always welcome.

So, I sat down with my son for 10 minutes, quickly determined what particular obsessions were preventing him from doing the work, thought up several ways in which we could break the task down into more manageable components for him and got him to finish the work. I wrote the teacher a note with my suggestions on getting him to complete the work in the classroom, put the completed work in his backpack and haven't heard back from her since. And to top it all off, that important classroom work we did hasn't been removed from his backpack all week; each day, it comes back home to me a little more crumpled and worse for wear, because nobody has bothered to take it out and look at it.

This year, I am going to try something new. I am done with threatening to sue. I am done with going into debt to pay for representation to force the school district to bring in someone with even more "expertise" to help in the classroom. From now on, I'm going to be a bitch in a new way. I'm going to tell the teachers how to do their jobs. I'm going to teach them all the amateur OT and behavioral techniques I've painstakingly learned through the last six years. I'm going to share the knowledge and share the wealth and maybe, just maybe, one day they'll be able to DO THEIR FUCKING JOBS! If not, I'll at least have saved some money, stayed out of blood pressure raising IEP meetings and ended up no worse off in terms of the education my son is receiving.