Start talking about your kid's IEP--now.

Getting an IEP for your kid in the Atlanta Public Schools (and, from what I've read, just about anywhere else) is like buying a car from a traditional car dealer. You go in there, you try to make a good deal for yourself; the salesman says yes yes yes, then mysteriously departs to check things out with his "manager"; he comes back shamefaced and says, "you know, I thought we could do this deal but my manager says we have to add the rustproofing back in."

You walk out of there not knowing whether you made the best deal you could or not, and not knowing whether the next guy who walks in there will make a much better deal than you did. Maybe you got screwed--but you've got no way to find out.

School IEP officials don't want us to compare notes on the services we secure for our children. They're banking on the fact that we're embarrassed to have to go hat in hand and ask for something special for our kids, or that we're reluctant to even admit to other parents that we have a special-needs child.

They will also invoke the idea of "confidentiality" whenever you even THINK of trying to compare your situation to another one you've heard about. This actually happened to us. The parents of another autistic child, whose condition was (in some key ways) remarkably similar to our child's, were generous to give us their child's entire file--his whole IEP.

We tried to use the precedent this child had set to secure a similar arrangement for our child, but our liaison wouldn't even let us describe the precedent in our meetings. As soon as we started talking about this other child, she started ranting about how we were violating all sorts of confidentiality clauses, even though the other parents had explicitly given us their permission to use their child's data.

You might think that the confidentiality of your child's IEP information is yours, as a parent, to preserve or waive, and that APS has no legal standing to fight to keep your case confidential should you, as the parent, wish to waive confidentiality for the sake of exploring precedent cases.

But this shrieking loon of a liaison wouldn't even let us speak aloud about the matter. She literally tried to drown us out in the meeting, like a five-year-old child trying not to hear something unpleasant.

Parents, it's time to share. Come on this blog, or other blogs, and talk about what you've gone through in IEP meetings; what you were able to secure (or why you were turned down); talk about the comportment of APS PEC employees in your meetings (were they prepared? Were they professional?).

Let's create a database of cases so the next parents who come through this pipeline (and you know many more are coming) won't have to negotiate in ignorance with shady double-dealers.