Have you ever had a meeting at your child’s school? Not a regular parent teacher meeting, but one where you have to take time off work and come in and discuss your child’s behavior?

It is usually proceeded by THE PHONE CALL. You know the one, where you’re at work and you see the school phone number pop up on your caller ID? Your heart drops into your stomach and you feel the bile rise in your throat. You answer with a cheerful,”Hello this is Elizabeth?” Hoping against hope that they are calling you because your child forgot their lunch or did something super amazing. Then you hear the,”Hello Ms. Gattman.” in that ‘bad news’ tone. You choke back the vomit as you listen to whatever your child has done now. Then you schedule THE MEETING.

This particular meeting was actually the second meeting of the year, the first being after my third grader was suspended on the third day of school. Yes, suspended in third grade. On the third day. I’m not going to go into the particulars of diagnoses and accommodations and different interventions, or whether or not it’s even appropriate to suspend a third grader. The principal has been talking about suspension since kindergarten. He’s been itching for it. My son has an IEP and he’s in a general ed classroom with minimal accommodations up until now, and that wasn’t working. So this meeting was to go over the behavior specialist’s evaluation and recommendations, and to decide to put a behavior plan in place. (The one we’ve been asking about since kindergarten, and the director of pupil services kept saying, ‘let’s wait until it’s needed.’ Then he got suspended.)

These meetings are pretty much all the same. You sit there and listen to all the ways your child isn’t good enough and why they need all this extra help and what the school is going to do or not do to address it. Then you have to decide if you think that’s appropriate or not, and what else you want to ask for.

But I’m not a special ed expert, I’m not an autism expert, I’m not a behavior expert. Until now, my husband and I let the school and the ‘experts’ guide us. until the suspension. That’s where I feel the school failed us. This was not new behavior, but this was a drastically new consequence. As a medical professional, if a patient presents to me with a problem, then I either have the solution, or I confer with my colleagues and research to come up with possible solutions. At the school, the educational experts shrugged their shoulders and said,”he doesn’t fit in our normal box, we don’t know what to do.” This from the experts.

So where is the gratitude in this? I have to look hard to find it. The behavior specialist did a great job with the eval and the subsequent recommendations. There are several people on the committee who honestly have my child’s best interest at heart and who really do want to help him. It’s heartwarming to hear them speak about him, and know he has some allies in school. He will finally have a behavior plan in place, which was badly needed. All of this is positive, even in the midst of the negative. Keep on the sunny side, as Ma Carter used to sing.