LD first grader

Picture Anne at her computer yelling at the screen,
“NO, no, no!” (Children and husband have learned
to ignore Anne when she rants and raves…)

This meeting should *not* be about Jessica’s progress,
or lack of progress, as an LD first grader.

This meeting is going to be about the *school’s* capactiy
and ability to help Jessica.

If they are unable to teach Jessica then they are potentially
looking at having to pay tuition to a private school. It is not
up to Jessica to adapt her learning style to them. They have
to find ways to teach her.

I’ll include an article from the NYTimes, I think Dad posted
it yesterday. I found it through the Wright’s Law Site.

How the Clip ‘N Snip’s Owner Changed Special Education
By BRENT STAPLES

he people of Florence, S.C., know Shannon Carter as the owner of Shannon’s Clip ‘N Snip, a barber shop where the locals get haircuts and conversation. The Clip ‘N Snip has room for seven barber chairs, but Shannon is limiting the business to two for the moment and renting out space until the economy improves enough for the barbering business to expand.
Shannon’s public school teachers are no doubt surprised to see her running a business and working out a financial plan. During the 1980’s she finished ninth grade failing virtually every subject, and was nearly illiterate. The schools told Emory and Elaine Carter that their daughter was terminally lazy and would “never see a day of college.” In truth, Shannon was suffering from a common but undiagnosed learning disability that made it difficult for her to comprehend the little that she could read. Alienated and depressed, Shannon became suicidal. In desperation her parents placed her in a private school for disabled children, where she jumped several grade levels within a few years and graduated actually reading on grade level.
The Carters then sued the school system for private-school tuition and were upheld in the landmark Supreme Court case known as Florence County School District Four v. Shannon Carter. The law before this case limited parents of disabled children to schools approved by the state. But the court ruled in Shannon’s case that the school system lost its right to plan a disabled child’s education if it failed to provide an “appropriate public education” as required by the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, known as the IDEA.
Ask about Shannon Carter in New York or Los Angeles, and you see school board lawyers snarling or hanging their heads in dismay. The school boards see Carter cases as “a voucher program for the rich,” in which affluent parents reserve spaces in private schools and then badger the school systems into paying burdensome tuition costs. Critics have a point when they note that small districts can be destabilized by the cost of one student’s stay at an expensive residential school, and that urban districts with too few textbooks are sometimes forced to underwrite lavish private school tuition. But as Congress prepares to reauthorize the federal special education program, it should bear in mind that the Carters went to court only after the public schools failed at their most basic mission: teaching Shannon to read.
The task of teaching reading is undermined by the common but mistaken belief that children are somehow neurologically “wired” to read. This view led to the “whole language” fad of the 1970’s, in which children were allowed to wander through books, improvising individual approaches to reading. The whole language technique works well with some children. But data from four decades of studies by the National Institutes of Health show that it is disastrous for the 4 in 10 children who have trouble learning to read. Nearly half these youngsters fall behind in the early grades, never catch up and eventually drop out.
In the most extreme cases, children seem to have abnormal activity in the parts of the brain that process phonemes — the basic sounds that correspond to the letters of the alphabet. The simplest rules of language make no sense to them. Asked for a word that rhymes with “cat,” for example, they simply draw a blank. The disorder strikes children of all backgrounds. It afflicts those who are read to as infants as well as those who grow up without a book in the house.
The fortunate children are diagnosed early and assigned to smaller classes where teachers take special care to teach them the fundamentals of written language that others take for granted. The children are walked through the alphabet again and again, learning to connect the letters to the sounds, the sounds to the syllables, the syllables to words and so on. The good news from the N.I.H. findings is that 95 percent of learning- impaired children can become effective readers if taught by scientifically proven methods. The bad news is that less than a quarter of American teachers know how to teach reading to children who do not get it automatically. At the moment, nearly half of all children placed in special education are there for reading difficulties. Federal scientists commonly describe them as “casualties of bad instruction.”
Part of the blame lies with colleges that have resisted federal attempts to improve teacher education programs. Part of the blame lies with Congress, which has clung to the view that curriculum is a state and local matter in which the federal government should not meddle. Congress failed to even notice the reading research until just recently, when the Bush administration made reading a priority.
Congress has focused almost solely on the fact that special education is expensive — and that it takes away money from regular education. The debate will go nowhere until lawmakers begin to view special and regular education as part of a single system that is being hampered by an all too pervasive problem — that schools are teaching reading in a way that fails to effectively reach millions of children. The basic lesson of the Carter case and the tens of thousands that have followed is that the country needs a national reading campaign, based on science. The longer we delay, the more families like Shannon Carter’s will bolt the system, taking public dollars with them.

Anne - calmed down now :-)

Is there any chance you can homeschool her? It sounds as if she isn’t getting what she needs at school, and spending a lot of time on homework for 1st grade is counter-productive.

Mary

Couldn’t have said it any better then this! You go girl…

Personally, I wouldn’t advise a parent to home school, unless the parent has been trained to teach remedial reading. Chances are they aren’t going to do much more than frustrate the child and themselves. I tried to teach my LD daughter how to read (before we new she was LD). We worked on phonics but she couldn’t sound out a word to save her life and I couldn’t figure out how to get through to her. Eventually she learned by site words, but that only got her to a 3rd grade reading level. The frustration we both experienced made our mother-daughter relationship very strained. She felt that I was always finding fault with her.
What most of the kids with reading delays need is a multi- modality approach to phonemic awareness. Once she was diagnosed, we had her tutored in Lindamood LIPS for 6 months. Her word attack skills prior to this were at a grade 2 level on the Woodcock, now they are at 15. She is now proudly sailing through Harry Potter’s 4th novel, a 600 page adventure and she LOVES to read, what a miracle. Mother and daughter have a much better relationship, now that I am not trying to teach her to read and spell.
Some folks on this list have had success with Reading Reflex, you might want to purchase that while you organize professional help. Be sure that the remedial teacher is using a method with a proven track record like LIPS. Phonics, whole language, see and say methods don’t work with kids that have poor phonemic awareness, assuming that is your daughter’s problem.
Don’t back off until she gets the program she needs, either through the school or privately. Those of us who have been there know how much a child’s self esteem suffers when they don’t get the help they need.

I didn’t read that this was about how Jessica would be adapted to school. I read that a meeting was scheduled to discuss Jessica’s academic performance. Such meetings always look at ways to adapt and accomodate the child. The LD won’t be willed away. I give the teacher enough credit to want to help Jessica, not blame her or her parents. Education is a team effort.

Your daughter sounds like my son in first grade. I don’t know what tests she is studying for but I would guess spelling ones. It is sorta pointless, as you have learned I am sure, to try to get a child to spell who can’t read the words. I would insist that she be dismissed from spelling requirements. It will reduce your stress immed.

I agree with Annie that the school isn’t meeting her needs. In my experience though it isn’t very easy to get them to do so. My son ended first grade as a nonreader and when I suggested at the IEP meeting that a different sort of program was needed, the ball was thrown back in my court. Basically, everyone thought he was making adequate progress but me and it was my problem because I hadn’t accepted that I had a child with a disability.

I would ask for an IEP meeting and make clear that the current arrangement isn’t working. If you are lucky, they will have other programs they can use. If you are not lucky, you will have to decide what to do.

Your choices are:

1. get an advocate to help in IEP meetings

2. Hire someone privately

3. Homeschool

We have done all three at times. We hired an advocate and got a great IEP only to have the district try to implement it using the same ineffective program. They claimed the teacher wasn’t adequately trained and it wasn’t the program. (It was a bit of both). We took our son to Read America in Orlando for Phonographix training (Reading Reflex). He did learn to read. (We have also done a lot of other therapy privately). And when it became clear that our choices were to fight the district legally or do it on our own, we opted to partially homeschool our son. He is reading near grade level now and the school now has an adequately trained resource person. Interestingly, the new resource teacher told me that my son is the only one who really can read out of all the kids in resource room (shows how well the school was doing).

Be aware that taking the legal route means that you have to show that the school was unable to provide an appropriate education. This means you have to let them do their stuff and fail at it. We weren’t able to stand back and let them mess up.

Beth

were probably due to the approach you used, rather than the fact that you were not a trained remedial teacher. “Reading Reflex” does not require any special training to use at home, and works for something like 95+% of children. The few children who do not respond to RR usually require a program such as LMB LiPS. LiPS is available to homeschoolers in kit form for about $500.

My own dd was in school and reading at a preschool level at age 8-1/2 when I bought a copy of “Reading Reflex” and started tutoring her at home. She is now 11 and reading on a beginning 7th grade level. I credit the approach we used, not my teaching expertise (I have no background in teaching). The success we experienced strengthened our mother-daughter relationship. We homeschooled full-time the following year in order to provide vision therapy and cognitive training. My daughter is now in school part-time (2-1/2 hours per day), but we continue to homeschool all academic subjects because we found she learns much better one-on-one.

Homeschooling is not the best option for every family. However, many families have found it is a better approach for a special needs child than school — which often offers too little of the wrong kind of curriculum.

Mary

Well, blush, thank you! ;-)

I can only say I sure wish I knew then what I know
now and wish I had discovered this board and the other
boards earlier.

Anne

Lisa,

I also have a first grade daughter who is hopefully about to receive S/L services and has auditory processing disorder.

One thing I asked for is that some of the homework be completed in school because they are giving too much homework for first graders!!! Not sure how that went over yet, although all agreed that they were giving a little too much homework. Definitely get an adaptation for spelling on the IEP. I asked for this, too, but left it general so I can change it (number of words) week to week depending on the difficulty level of the words.

What reading program is the school/resource room using? Is she in reading instruction in the resource room or the regular class?

I have bought Reading Reflex and will be ordering the worksheets tomorrow. We will use this at least until the end of the school year and then decide to either continue or change to something else.

One thing that would concern me is that if your daughter is being pulled for S/L and LD resource, she might be missing so much in the regular classroom that it is doing her more harm than good. The LD resource MUST be using a very effective program like Lindamood Bell, Orton-Gillingham based program, or Phono-Graphix for it to be worth it, in my opinion (of seeing years of ineffective public school LD programs).

Just out of curiosity, if you don’t mind me asking, how did you get an LD label in early first grade? It’s hard to have the discrepancy required for placement that early. I’m not worried about it personally, because we can get everything we want for our daughter with the S/L impaired label, but I’m just wondering how different systems label LD early.

Oh, and like Beth and MaryMN, I believe in finding out what helps and take charge of getting that for my child even if I have to do it myself. Never would I wait on the school system to get it all together.

Janis

Janis,

My child was classified as LD also in first grade. This is because he came into the system at age 3 as a preschooler with a disability because of his language delays. He was classified as speech impaired in K. They changed the classification to specific language disability in first grade. In a sense then, he never had to qualify in the conventional way.

Beth

My 7th grader has been classified LD since 1st grade. I too, wish I had known then what I know now. I’ve found you have to push to get what you want. I sat back for a long time and thought they were the professionals, they must know what they are doing. WRONG! He’s still only reading on a 4th grade level and writing on a 1st grade level. My last meeting seems to be bringing results. I think it helped using the right words to get their attention, such as FAPE, Civil Rights, Less Restrictive Environment. The last meeting brought more results than any so far….but I”ve still got along way to go!
Good Luck!

Anne thank you so much for your response. I will go to the parents teachers meeting with a different mindset. I will let you know how th meeting went.

I do not think I am ready to homeschool her. But I will surely look into the reading programs you sugessted. thanks so much for your input.

Beth her problem is her writing and her math test. Her math test consist of writing and solving word problems. She having trouble epressing herself in writing . She knows many of her sight words . But when she has to perform so many steps in solving the problems on her math test . She just freezes up and does nothing. I think that if her math test were simplified(but still on 1st grade level) I think she would have a better chance in succeding.

Beth,

Were the language scores alone used for the discrepancy or did he have a significant academic delay already in first grade as well? My child has some language scores that are two years below her CA (plus APD), but we don’t have reading or math scores showing anything significant (yet).

Janis

Janis,

We moved to Florida just before he started first grade. As I recall, there was a meeting to review his materials from New York and to decide upon classification. The special ed teacher had done some informal testing on him—letters, sounds ect. She saw him as quite behind, as I recall but it wasn’t anything formal. He had come in from NY classified as having a visual-motor integration disability as the result of testing done at the end of K (His speech had improved so much that the speech impaired classification was no longer appropriate but noone felt comfortable declassifying him). I am not sure why the school didn’t just take the classification he already had. He did retain the OT services though as well as speech. I requested formal testing at the end of first grade which included all the standard stuff but his classification did not change as a result of it.

He was also pulled out for math in first and second grade, although he does not have a math disability. His language issues, visual spatial problems, and memory impacted his ability to be in a regular classroom. Private therapy resolved these issues sufficiently enough that he is now in a regular classroom and getting solid B’s.

Beth