Kintropy In Action

Janette bakes the best, homemade rugelach.  For the uninitated, rugelach is a chocolate-and-cream-cheese pastry.  Janette prepares it over two days, letting the dough sit overnight in the fridge.  It is rich.  It is chocolately.  Well-prepared, it is heaven.

Yesterday, we shared this treasure with Hannah's Individualized Family Service Plan (IFSP) team.  We had added the rugelach based on a tip from the All-Born-In Inclusion conference Janette attended a year-and-a-half ago.  It was our ice-breaker:  a way to introduce ourselves and Hannah to an almost new (to us) team, particularly because we had called the meeting to revise Hannah's 6-month old IFSP. 

We had written the IFSP with a prior team, intending to focus on communication, mobility, and inclusion with typical peers.  The original teaching team had worked well with Hannah; we were seeing significant progress in both communication and mobility.  Although we attributed some of that to our work with Hannah at home and Hannah's own motivation and development, we were still impressed with the program.  Plus the classroom was based five minutes from our house in a local school:  overall, a good situation for everyone.

Six months later, Hannah's formerly locally-based pre-school was in the process of relocating to its 3rd facility (a business park), an hour's bus ride each way from our house.  The 2nd facility had had no running water or bathrooms in-room.  Hannah had no typical peers in her class.  Though district planning and inertia, we had stumbled backwards into a self-contained classroom, twice a week, an hour's ride from the house.

So we called a meeting.  We came armed with constructive criticism, positive feedback on what had been working, a plan to move Hannah out of the newest facility and into a nearby preschool with typical peers, the right stakeholders (Hannah [of course], J, the director from our preschool-of-choice, and L, a nursing manager from CNS) ... and rugelach.

In the end, the meeting was very productive.  The Early Intervention team, who had also assembled the right stakeholders, was open to our feedback about the current school and to our plan for moving Hannah to our selected preschool (Gabriel's old one, in fact).  We discussed medical issues (mainly:  access to a sink and bathroom), consultative visits to the school by PTs and OTs, and, toward the end, a schedule for getting things moving in this direction.

Kudos to the entire team for being open to changing things up and moving Hannah into a fully inclusive environment.  Particular thanks to J, the preschool director, for her openess in going this route with Hannah.  And to Hannah's Early Intervention teacher who spent some time getting to know Hannah, singing and playing with her, as the meeting progressed.

So, in a few short weeks, Hannah will follow in her brother's footsteps and attend his preschool.  We've got some extra work, planning, & coordinating to do, but I think Janette, Gabriel, and I are excited.  We'll see what Hannah thinks soon, but I think she'll have a great time at preschool and continue to blossom into the beautiful young girl she is becoming.

-- Dad