moving update

We have a contract... the school has been notified... my house is full of boxes... I feel like I'm losing my mind. I guess that means it's official!

The SPED director and principal have both said Noah can finish out the school year even though we'll probably move a week or two earlier. I've e-mailed the new county's SPED director, but haven't gotten a response yet. I'm hoping that she doesn't blow me off since Noah's not starting 'til August, because it takes a lot of work to get ready for Noah's arrival.

In other news, our AV therapist is doing lots of testing on Noah. I don't have an official report yet, but the results have been interesting to me. On the TOLD P-4 Noah's subsection age equivelant scores ranged from <4 to 7+. He's got really strong strengths, but some major weaknesses too. On another test that he's doing now, he got a school readiness age equivelant of 4 years 7 months. That's only a few months behind his current age, and if we were still correcting his age for prematurity would be right on the mark. What's interesting is that when you look at the subtests he scored very high on the letters, colors, shapes, and numbers, but only got 4 questions correct on the size comparison section. That's pretty much how it is... What he's good at, he's really good at, but his deficits are pretty significant. Hopefully the JTC will know what to do with him, because no one else seems to!

Moving & Schools, etc.

As if we don't already have enough going on, our landlord decided to "do something different with the house" so we have to move by June 30th. Yes, that's 10 days before we're leaving for California - it's going to be a wild and crazy spring/summer! We're hoping to buy a house (yay!) and have been looking at various places.
When we moved to our current location, "good school district" was not even on the radar. I was teaching at a private school and my husband worked at the same school. There was no reason to expect that all of our children wouldn't enjoy the free tuition at that same wonderful private school. Now it matters a little bit more.
Our current school district is small, and fairly rural. There is no teacher of the deaf at all in the county, so they contract with one from another county. This is in my opinion only minimally effective, as evidenced by the fact that our OT was the one who saw the need for an FM system for Noah, and I was the one who notified that HI teacher, after realizing that no one else even considered that that might be helpful. Other than that, though, they've really been very good for us. Personality differences aside, everyone is really great to work with. We have a great team, who I feel really cares about Noah and getting him what he needs, and I couldn't be more happy about the K teachers that he would work with next year.

There are two other districts (besides this one) we have look at houses in, both of which are quite a bit larger and more suburban. They both have numerous HI teachers, along with the other services that we are already receiving (PT, OT, speech, vision, and O&M) but there is no gaurantee that the individual practitioners would be as top notch or as willing to work with us as our current location. Also, because the districts themselves are quite a bit larger, there's a lot more beaurocracy to deal with in order to get things done. Is it worth it to exchange the one service we want for all of the good things we already get? I just don't know. It's all a bit of a gamble, really. Any kind of change (even just moving down the street) is going to be very stressful for Noah, but the summer before kindergarten does seem the ideal time to make a change if one is going to be made. I guess we'll see what comes of it.