Today is Sophie’s IEP.

Not my favorite day of the year, though (knock wood) I don’t anticipate any big bumps this time. Sophie’s lawyer (she has one after last year’s IEP) reviewed the draft copy and assures me the accomodations we want — most notably, the classroom aide — are in place.

Which is good, because I look at documents like draft IEPs and all the letters and numbers swirl together, much the way the doctors all sound like adults on Peanuts cartoons when they start talking about serious stuff and my kid.

All I see when I look at a draft IEP (and I’ve looked at several over the years) are lots of little boxes to check, tasks that must be completed to satisfy the feds and other government entities that dole out funding.

For the most part (and yes, there are notable exceptions) the IEP is bullshit, or at least irrelevant. (For the lucky uninitiated, that’s Individual Education Program, the legal document that dictates the next year of a special needs kid’s school life, decided upon by a committee including teachers, principal, therapists, parents and in our case, lawyers.) Like standardized testing, I don’t see it having much to do with Sophie’s day-to-day school experience, or the stuff that’s really important.

You can have a super IEP with everything in it, but if it’s not implemented correctly (and really, how do you know, unless you put a camera on your kid) it’s worthless. Ditto if you have a crappy classroom teacher or an inexperienced special education instructor or a terrible classroom aide.

We’ve been so lucky, so far. Each of Sophie’s teachers has been wonderful. The classroom aide — the one I was told for years in theory would impede the goal of the “least restrictive setting” by coddling Sophie and holding her back — has exceeded my expectations. I love this woman, who proves that the right aide really can provide the least restrictive setting.

That doesn’t mean there haven’t been problems this past school year. Problems, sadly, that won’t be much affected by what’s in Sophie’s IEP. Handwriting is a struggle. It doesn’t seem to matter what we write in that IEP: bottom line, Sophie needs way more occupational therapy than anyone can fund, and no directive is going to convince my kid to use the computer when she doesn’t want to and all her friends are writing by hand.

Ditto for spelling, where I feel like Goldilocks:

Those spelling words  are too hard!

These spelling words are too easy!

Where are the spelling words that are just right? And where’s the attitude adjustment Sophie needs to spend several hours a week memorizing them?

You won’t find any of that in an IEP.

And yet, later today we’ll all squeeze into a box of a conference room to figure out what sort of boxes need to be checked for Sophie. At the end, I’ll get a lot of pressure to review the final documents and sign them quickly to make the school district’s deadline. (I know more than one special education teacher who’s quit in frustation over the paperwork this process entails.) I’ll stress out over the amount of time they are pulling Sophie from the regular classroom for special ed (at what point is this no longer mainstreaming?) and in the end I’ll wind up signing the paperwork because I feel guilty — for waiting too long, for being unsure, for sucking up so many resources with my anteater of a kid. For not demanding more resources.

It’s a lovely process, a reminder — despite the hopeful term Individualized — of the box Sophie’s in. It makes me think of the photo booth strip taped to the right side of my computer screen at work. Four panels of Sophie being silly, including one where she looks like she truly is popping out of a box.

Maybe I’ll bring that strip with me today, put it on the conference table along with all the paperwork and each side’s tape recorder — to remind us (me included) that we’re all supposed to be on the same side.