LOST
BOY
ambitious goals for his son. He
refused to accept anything less.
A few minutes earlier, Daniel
McCall, one of the district’s eight
attorneys for the special education division, had kicked this reporter out of the room, then out of
the school building entirely. After
arguing for the meeting’s privacy
on legal grounds, he and the special education coordinator simply
refused to have the meeting in the
presence of a reporter. (The following account of that meeting is based
on an audio recording supplied by
the family. Both Greg and the school
district had digital recorders on and
visible during the meeting.)
Greg was livid as the meeting
began. He hadn’t been told the
district would bring an attorney.
At one point, McCall intervenes
as Greg, the specialists and Max’s
teacher, Emily Schneider, appear
ready to write more ambitious
goals for Max’s IEP. “Any goal that
you put ... the team has to say, ‘Do
we reasonably feel or believe that
we can achieve a mastery?’” the
attorney says. “Just be mindful of
that, that’s what you’re agreeing
to. If you don’t think you have a
reasonable belief that he can do
that, don’t put it down.”
“Are you just here to help him
HUFFINGTON
01.12.14
craft an IEP that they’ll go to
court with?” Greg shoots back.
“Why are you here?”
“We want to focus on the child’s
goals, not personal goals,” the special education coordinator says.
“It’s hard to do that when the
gentleman is interrupting and
stating how they should write it
so, legally, they can defend it in
court,” Greg responds. The district
“We’re losing our little
boy, and this process is a
joke. They keep saying he’s
progressing, but how
come he has no vocabulary
left? How come he
has poop in his pants?”
winds up offering Max $1,500 in
therapy, Greg says, or enough to
cover Max’s therapy for about a
week and a half.
That afternoon, Max spends
three hours running around his
house, jumping on a trampoline,
grabbing people’s hands and dragging them to do things he can’t describe. He wears big headphones
attached to nothing, probably because he likes the way they make
his ears feel. He tends to stay close
to Maya, the center of his universe.