Big Milestones Can Be Scary

Wow! It’s been a long time since I’ve posted. Hopefully, I’ll get a little more consistent. For this post, we are going back to the end of the last school year. It was a huge milestone for us. We had Payton’s three-year evaluation for her IEP. It was amazing to how much she has grown in three years. We found out that Payton had met her behavior goal and adaptive behavior goal. Now we can drop those goals. Some of her prevention strategies can turn into accommodations to help her continue to grow.

Now for the scary part: She has met her paraprofessional support. This means she no longer needs the one-on-one help/supervision. Removing that one-on-one help is the scary part. Payton will be without
it. She will have shared support though. This means she will share a para with another child. We know that the other child needs the para more than Payton, so our concern will be the amount of attention she gets. We knew this was coming; and we can’t help being worried for her. If we’d just listen to her, we’d never be worried though. She’s been telling us, “I’m a big kid now.”

She has mastered her morning meetings and now they want to transition that time into her writing minutes. Again, we could not be prouder of her! The new school year is starting; and I’m, per the usual, a nervous wreck. All the supports we previously had are still there. They just look a little different. I’ll most likely continue to worry about her; and she’ll most likely continue to kick butt. We know she’ll rock this year the same as she has previous years. She never lets us down. She’s an inspiration.