KECC Update

Julie and I had two reassuring meetings this afternoon at the KECC. The first was with James's classroom teacher, Melinda, and her two helpers. At the regularly-scheduled meeting last month, we came away feeling a little discouraged after it seemed like we heard a lot about what James couldn't do without help, and Melinda, who can come across as a little brusque at times, seemed kind of frustrated about him.

So Julie set to work as only Julie can, talking to other parents and trying to figure out if James would be better off in another classroom. Along the way, she bumped into the Inclusion Specialist, Allison, one day—we hadn't known there was such a person—and that opened the way for a few good conversations that helped us clarify what exactly we were looking for and how we could best advocate for that.

After a lot of prep (again, mainly on Julie's part) we felt pretty good going in today that we had a solid, thoughtful way of approaching our concerns without making Melinda defensive. And Melinda seemed to have given the meeting some thought herself, as she seemed more patient and upbeat today about James's progress. (We actually suspect that Allison the Inclusion Specialist did a little working on both sides, but who knows.)

Melinda and the two aides told us today that James's awareness of his peers has really increased: he looks at them, sometimes goes to where kids are doing something he's interested in, and will even smile or giggle at their goings on. One of the aides told us that she intiated a game between James and another kid where they rolled a car back and forth to each other when she counted down from three and said "Go!", and James loved it and stuck with it for 10 minutes or so. They also said that James is getting better at following class routines, and said that even though he loves playing in the sand, whenever they say, "Line up, Ducks!" (since they're the Duck Room) James goes immediately over to the door to go inside.

The big thing with speech / cognition right now that they're working on is "Put on" and "Put in." Melinda enthusiastically showed us some of the toys they'd dug up for James, and in some cases modified, to help him work on this skill—as you would expect, lots of noise-making and cause-effect toys to motivate him. We also found out that he qualified for Music Therapy, which is wonderful, so he'll start receiving that before this school year finishes.

We also met with James's Discrete Trial team—the people who see him twice a week for one hour after the regular class day finishes. In the shortest possible terms, Discrete Trial is a system that breaks down actions or behaviors into their smallest parts, then builds to a desired behavior one step at a time through repetition and the careful keeping of data about what progress is being made. They've made big strides with James's throwing or sweeping things he doesn't want (especially food at meal time) away from himself, and with James trying new foods and textures.

They're also working on things like repeating gestures (patting a table, for example) and an early version of matching, where they put a cup and a Duplo block on the table in front of James, then hand him either a cup or a Duplo block and he's supposed to put what he's been given next to the match in front of him. Progress there is slow, but steady; I think they said his best day was 50%.

All in all, a good hour and a half at the KECC—we came away feeling great about James's being there. He has quite a team working for him.