In the end, I did not bring food to the first team meeting of the school year. Or a lawyer.

Instead, I brought Sophie.

It was not a tough meeting; I hadn’t expected it would be, or I likely would not have brought her. Sophie’s formal IEP meeting takes place each spring, and because so much can change in a few months, a long time ago I asked that the IEP require that a meeting be held within the first month of school. It’s been a really valuable tool.

We tweaked a few testing modifications and talked about lunch time procedures. Sophie interrupted several times, despite sharp (but, I hoped, kindly maternal) glances from me, and finally the speech pathologist jumped in and stage-whispered very loudly, “Do you want me to make this one of her goals?”

I nodded, my face hot. No one else in the room seemed bothered by Sophie’s excited questions and comments; I guess they are all used to it, used to her. Maybe more than used to her.

Mainstreaming a kid like Sophie is such a new thing at this school, a school that already has so many challenges, left with the kids who don’t qualify for the fancy gifted academy next door, whose parents haven’t sought out high-browed charter school options. This school, which is obviously starved for resources, with shabby edges and the challenges every public school faces today, has embraced my eager but challenging kid and given her the tools she needs to thrive.

Except for one.

Math, science, reading, social studies — Sophie’s getting it all, plus choir and visual art. It’s pretty amazing. But she’s made it clear that it’s not enough. She wants what other kids are getting. She wants drama class.

And so at the end of the meeting, I shifted awkwardly in my chair and made a little announcement. I know this has nothing to do with anyone at the school, I began, but I don’t want anyone to be blindsided, then explained that I’ll be approaching district administrators with my request to get Sophie (and any other kid from her school who wants to be) placed in a drama class at the gifted academy next door.

Some background:

When Sophie began middle school in sixth grade, she quickly realized that drama class was not among the elective options for students at her school. But it is for the kids at the gifted school. To complicate matters, the kids at the gifted school can take any elective offered at Sophie’s school; that is not reciprocal.

Sophie figured all this out before I did. She cornered the gifted school principal in the cafeteria at lunch and bugged him about this for months, to no avail. Ultimately I wrote a note to both principals and was told that no, this was not an option. You must qualify as gifted to take a class at the gifted school, even if it’s drama and not, say, pre-calculus. Sophie and I both tried to accept this, and took the options offered — including a not-great attempt at starting a drama club (which all but excluded Sophie) and the suggestion I sign her up for summer camp (that was a great week, but not enough).

I thought about it all summer, I told the team, and I have to say something. I haven’t done a formal analysis, but I’m willing to bet that the racial and economic breakdown at the gifted school looks a lot different from the racial and economic breakdown at Sophie’s school. Down syndrome aside, this is simply unfair. These gifted schools are segregating kids in dangerous ways that have flown under the radar — and someone needs to say something. Perhaps it’s easier for me, the parent of a kid whose entry into this school was never in question.

Plus, I don’t have a good explanation for Sophie as to why she can’t take drama. It doesn’t make sense to either of us.

And so, game on. Now the only thing to decide is what to bring along to that first meeting with the district administrators, assuming I get one. Food, the lawyer, Sophie? Maybe all three.

I had no clue how to apply that. And by the end of the meeting with the principal, my cluelessness was evident. Also my bitchiness.

“Were you raised in New York?” the private psychologist asked me, as we walked outside. 

No, I replied. Why do people always ask me that? (That’s a rhetorical question.)

Maybe it was the full moon. Ms. X said she could feel it in her kids — she called it before she’d even looked at the calendar.

Or maybe I was just doomed. I’m never going to get what I want for Sophie. Clearly bringing the psychologist didn’t do it. Probably the only thing that would work is a lawyer.

The principal DID apologize for abandoning two meetings in a row. She DID acknowledge that I’m not the first parent to complain about playground safety, and teacher/student ratios. But she was quick to tell me her numbers (she says it’s 1 to 88; i’d heard 1 to 92) are perfectly legal.

“I know,” I said. “I researched it. They’re legal because there is no law.”

Whoops. I shouldn’t have said that. She frostily answered that she’s well within the district policy. (So now I need to research THAT.)

She told me that if we write into Sophie’s IEP that someone must walk my child from the cafeteria to the playground each day at lunch, that counts as a personal aide. “And then it wouldn’t be the least restrictive setting for Sophie,” she said, “and you’d need to research other programs in the district.”

(I’m beginning to hate the term “least restrictive setting” as much as I hate the term “retard”.)

I think this is the point in the conversation where I actually used the word bullshit. I saw her literally start to quiver, then stop. I did feel badly, but kept going.

“Look, I KNOW what a personal aide is. You mean to tell me that someone to spend 5 minutes ensuring my kid’s safety is the same as a full time aide in the classroom?”

She claimed that’s how the district sees it. Her suggestion (mandate): Find some sort of solution that doesn’t have to be written into a binding legal document.

Hmmm. Why does that make me nervous?

Everything about this principal makes me nervous. I think about that old neumonic (is that how you spell neumonic? I doubt it) device — “the principal is your pal”. I wish. I’d like to think so. As always, she said all the right things, that she loves Sophie, that she thinks Sophie is in the right place. I feel myself pulled toward her, wanting to like her. But she’s like a boss, and you always have to be careful about getting chummy with the boss.

“Yeah,” I thought, “as long as I don’t ask you for anything.” (At least that one didn’t come out of my mouth.)

And really, the upshot of yesterday’s meeting was that sthe principal took the opportunity to belittle the poor speech therapist who had had the guts to complain to her about the 1 to 92 playground thing. (The speech therapist does duty once a week, so she knows firsthand what it’s like.) Oh, and she was obviously mad at another team member who’d shared information about another kid’s IEP. The principal made it clear she was holding that woman back after the meeting, to let her have it.

I didn’t let anyone have it. Not really. Because I wasn’t sure what to say. If I was writing a story about someone else in this situation, I’d know just what they should say and do, and I know where to go to find the information to make the case. But as such, I’m lost.

I watched it.

Turned out, it was a very old tape (much heavier than current VHS tapes, which I guess are lighter because they’re getting ready to go POOF altogether, followed by DVDs, leaving me screwed) with Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious” taped after the 1992 documentary “Educating Peter,” which a friend had given me — she found when she was cleaning out her old tapes.

The tracking was awful, so I kept having to look away, but to be honest, I would have been looking  away, no matter what. The documentary won an Academy Award, so it’s not that the piece is poorly done — to the contrary, I was impressed with the head-on approach. The “nut graph,” as we say in journalism, was simple in a good way: Federal law has mainstreamed kids with disabilities. They are in our public schools. Here is the example of how one kid affected his third grade classroom.

I was also impressed that, at the outset, the filmmakers said they were not taking a political position — that some people liked mainstreaming, others did not. But curiously, at the end, they put up a big fat caveat: a black and white typed message saying that a. not all kids with Down syndrome have behavioral problems like Peter’s. And b. that all kids can benefit from the mainstreaming experience.

So I guess there was some pressure, after the movie came out. I wasn’t at all surprised about the former comment, since it’s what kept me looking away. I’ve got to say (and this whole “Down syndrome Box” thing won’t work if I’m not honest — who knows, maybe it won’t work, anyway, but I’m going to try, at the risk of making enemies with the likes of Peter’s mom) that if I’d seen this documentary when Sophie was a baby, I would have tossed myself out the highest window I could have found.

Ray walked in when the movie started. He tried in vain to fix the tracking. When he saw what it was he left. As you’ll recall, he didn’t care one bit for “Graduating Peter,” the follow-up documentary.

“The kid has ADD, too,” he said, as he hightailed it back to the kitchen.

I am quite certain that Peter is a lovable, wonderful, productive member of society. And I can’t speak to his high school years, as I didn’t watch that one and am not sure I will. But I can say that he was a freaking handful for his third grade teacher, a woman who appeared from the movie to have absolutely no experience with special needs kids. It was hard to say whether there was an aide in the classroom. There could have been, but if there was, no mention was made.

Instead, the short film is presented as a year filled with, basically, the task of getting third graders to police this kid. They did a good job, I have to admit, but they did it was so much compassion, grace and maturity (onscreen, at least, and that even includes the “uglier” moments, which the filmmakers, to their credit, did put in) that I have to wonder (sorry, Carrie Bradshaw) just how much the fact that cameras were in the classroom had to do with the experience.

That’s the problem. There’s no way to truly document the experience your kid (special needs or otherwise) will have in the classroom. I learned this when I tried to volunteer in Sophie’s public preschool room. The Amazing Ms. Janice wouldn’t even let me in the door — and for good reason, I learned, the morning I did visit. My presence changed everything. Cameras — even with the filmmakers’ best intentions — changed everything, too. I’d bet on it. Peter was one challenging third grader, and everything I know in my being tells me those kids acted differently toward him because they were onstage.

Or maybe I’m just a cynical bitch. That is definitely a possibility.

I cringed more than once, watching, because although the third grade Peter is what Ray and I would most unkindly label “low functioning” (Sophie, I think, does many things better already, at 5) I saw my daughter in Peter, again and again. I’d piled my lap with magazines to read while I watched, in case exactly that happened, so I peered from around the pages of Real Simple and Bust to see Peter say, “Soooorrrrry” just like Sophie; to see him hug (inappropriately) his classmates and refuse to let go, just like Sophie. When he turned his head to the side, I saw Sophie. When he threw himself on the floor and said, “Sleepy!” I saw Sophie.

I watched that movie and I saw Sophie disrupting that third grade classroom and even though Peter/Sophie did well at the end and even won a prize, I saw my daughter hopelessly behind in academics, with no “real” friends — a mascot of a classroom of kids that pulled together to help out the f-ed up child tossed in with them.

Perhaps not the best thing to watch, three weeks before kindergarten starts. I think I’ll dig up the first season of “Life Goes On” for my next installment.