Would this help?

it is supposed to be called an IEP. It’s not the lack of info,it is the lack of respect for the law.

Angela in Ca,

I hear you!

It is so hard to know what to ask for on the IEP. The information is avialble but tough to find as it is scattered over multiple sites, some of which insist their way is the only way. It is tough to get straight answers in some schools for various reasons. Something like you discussed would be very helpful to get parents going in the right direction.

Good luck!
Barb

I used some info out of “Educational Care”by Dr Mel Levine.So for my child’s IEP this time I am putting in objectives that my child will keep several notebooks of class vocabulary words, spelling words usually misspelled in child’s classroom writing,and math words and concepts illustrated and defined.This way hopefully I will be making sure I see progress for her and that the school is actually complying ,with my being able to look at notebook and see what she is learning.You know I had re- read my childs evaluation from a while ago and saw that she had problems with working memory but never really looked into it. The book described things -modifications you can do at school to help the child.We keep on learning-

THere are a lot more theories and models for why & how kids read or don’t read, and in the case of reading the cause is more entwined with the proposed cures. And, of course, the proifessional in reading often don’t have as much training or expertise.
How many different places did you go for the cancer diagnosis? The medical field’s not that different — you can get widely different opinions… they are, I admit, less likely to say “don’t bother with treatment” but I’d attribute that to the difference between not reading and death.

Here’s my fantasy. Your child has auditory processing deficits and the recommended treatment is ____________. Your child has sensory motor deficits and the recommended treatment is _____________. The school provides ________ and you provide ___________. After a review if progress is not significant another treatment option is _________.

You know that nothing anywhere near this happened. It was (school district) he is a bad child and you are bad parents, teacher ( aren’t you happy he’s reading at 1.5 grade level instead of 1.3 and he’s in 7th grade, (pediatrician) ask the school, (every specialist) try this $2000 program. Regarding IEPs, he’s had one since 1st grade. It always said he would read a passage…, but they have NO programs to teach him differently. (No, Lindamood, no O.G., no P.G. Nothing!!!) I did my own searching because no one would help me. I got programs that most kids in my school will never even hear about.

How many of you have really had someone guide you? How many programs have you looked at and said, I’d spend the $2000 if it would help, but there is no one willing to tell you what to do or not do. I am very happy with Sally Shaywitz’s book “Overcoming Dyslexia” because she names specific program….still many are not included. I am a special ed teacher and I still did not know what to do and people more educated than me just looked the other way. What about the parents of my 28 kids each year, who thought our district was really doing something to teach their child to read. I’ll tell you that many of those dear children won’t get even a high school diploma and the school will make them think it was their fault.

Look at the American Cancer Society website, even non-fatal cancers have standard treatment options. Why can’t an education website, even this one, have standard treatment options for lds. Why can’t each one of us make an informed decision?

Angela,

I have found that most special ed. teachers and district administrators are very ignorant about how to teach an LD child to read (and various medical professionals are probably worse). Most have never heard of PG or OG or Lindamood Bell. I used to be one of them until my own child had a problem. Now I practically beg people to train in one of these programs. But the last couple of years have been tight on money, and the district will not pay for the trainings, so as a result, I’m not seeing many teachers willing to fund it themselves. I’ve paid for my own training and have convinced my child’s school to go along with me. But until school personnel are trained to understand the process of reading, we’ll never see remediation or meaningful IEP’s.

Janis

Well, we have a list here on this website; disorganized, but a list. The problem is that to get it into schools first we have to bind and gag all the “whole-language” true believers who think phonics is demon worship…

There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of incentive to develop programs such as this in education.
Medicine is a completely different system. If a doctor or hospital is not doing a good job they will 1)Lose their license, 2) Go out of business.

Schools have no competition. It is a “We will do what WE think is best, customer be damned.” system.

Competition would help. It is absolutely the place to start.

I think the American Cancer Society would have nothing to print if their was no competition. There would be no incentive for anyone to find the best methods. Doctors would do as they please and the local hospital (imagine it being the only one you were allowed to go to) would use the treatments they ‘felt’ like using.

I have found my forray into the educational system to be an eye opening experience. I have come to the conclusion long ago that “they” don’t know what they are doing so as a parent I better figure this out.

For a long time I have been amazed that the following is not possible, even for those who choose to work outside the school system and are willing to spend whatever it takes of their own money: go to someone to whom (without a one year wait!) you pay a pile of money and who does a thorough evaluation of your child, determines the deficiencies (and, for an added plus, strengths), tells you how to go about remediating them, and gives you the names of whom to go for for remediation. You go to these people and pay them more piles of money and they do said remediation. I now realize that this is what happens when you die and go to heaven, except there you probably don’t have to pay the piles of money.

There isn’t even a book to guide you through all this—they tend to be very general and rely on the teachers to do various things (very vaguely stated) to help the child. (“All Kinds of Minds” is in this vein, though it does a good job in pointing out and describing many of the areas children may have problems with.) I haven’t seen Sally Shaywitz’s book, but I can applaud her if only for actually naming names of things that work.

Maybe the people on this board should band together and put out “The Fed Up Mother’s Guide to Remediating Your Kid’s LD.”

Very, Very good idea.

We could do this! We could share our stories of how it is done along with the research.

It really can be done.

I like your title for the book. That is is in a nutshell. It took becoming completely fed up for me to go after those deficits myself.

My attitude toward the school is “If you can’t help me, please, at least, just get out of my way!”

.

She once suggested collected everyone’s info on various problems and ways of remediating them. I think she volunteered to put them all together and see if the LDOnline people could make it permanently available. But then, Victoria got caught up in her move and some of us who volunteered to put info together fell down on their end of the job (myself included). It’s still a great idea though. I wonder if Victoria had a chance to get the LDOnline people’s reaction. In an earlier post she said she was thinking of starting a website of her own—maybe she could include a guide there if it couldn’t be done on this site. (If I say so myself, I do like my suggested title.)

YES!!! Today I marched into the AP for special ed at my son’s school and demanded an IEP ammendment for a resaerch based program to teach him to read. I said I’m going to pay for LMB through a well respected ed center 1 hr 3x/week and want LAUSD to pay for it and continue in the next school year. Said AP chuckled and said she’ll try to get the program specialist to the district to come. She told me the team won’t approve it. AND as a professional, she has problems with programs or centers that charge a lot of money. And why doesn’t she, a Ph.D see the research on LMB in the ed journals. I told her I’m a Ph.d too, and I believe this is the way to go. The (sometimes) 1 on 1 resource remediation which is using Open Court a year below his current grade of 2nd ain’t doing it. He’s stuck. Now… how am I going to back this up. I had a brief assessment done by an ed therapist who has her own center - it was a combo of W-J and Gibson Cognitive items. AP’s comment - don’t you have to be a psych. to do cognitive testing?

In March I asked for CAPD testing, which a former ed therapist (private of course) said he had problems with. He’s on a waiting list with a parttime person somewhere not near here who will call in the summer and if he’s not available she’ll go on to the next person and come back to him in the fall. I can’t stand it!

Thanks for listening to my latest ranting and raving.

I posted a long reply but the new system is being a little tricky about it so don’t know if it will show up.

Again,
(1) My own reading tutoring outlines are available by email, free, no strings, just please respect copyright.
(2) Ask me a question — eg evaluation and placement fo rtutoring, if you want it, and I will type up a reply when possible.
(3) Others can send me their old posts, outlines, and especially descriptions of programs, and I will add them to the reference file.
(4) I want to get a website going. All help appreciated.

Amy, I was having my son work at a clinic after school, but the school was doing nothing to provide or reinforce his Lindamood program. They found one LiPS trained teacher at another school and for a while they bussed him there, but I kept documentation showing that he was only getting maybe one hour of LiPS a week. I wanted LiPS during his day and if the school could not provide it they would have to pay for someone else to do so. Of course they did not want to do that, so I told them in writing that I would let the state of California decide what needed to be done and who would pay for what. I filed for a fair hearing and I hired an advocate. Now, I did not go to fair hearing because just having my advocate sitting at my side during the IEP meeting changed everyone’s perspective. Advocates are expensive, but you might check with TASK (Team of Advocates for Special Kids). I think they are in Santa Ana or Anaheim. If your advocate is a lawyer (my was a paralegal) you can request reimbursement from the district for your legal fees. I did get about 4 months of intensive work at the clinic with the district paying the bill and providing transportation. On the down side, the district is always watching the clock and the $$ and wanting to discontinue services. We finally went our own way, but in the meantime the district did start training their own people in LiPS and providing their own Fast ForWord. Put everything in writing to your school, keep track of time because it is easy for there to be delays (summer is coming up) and they hope you’ll move, forget or forgo the hassle. You won’t do any of those- stay strong and firm that your child needs research proven methods to teach him to read. Good luck!

The SLP who has my son (# 6 on the list) on her list called today after I told the AP yesterday I want to talk to her. She said there’s 2 of them is the whole of LAUSD who do this testing, part-time and there’s no way the’ll get to my son this semester, and they’re used to being out of compliance!

I just spoke to someone who successffully negotiated the system for her daughter and she gave me the name of a high powered atty who only takes cases she knows she can win, costs a mint, and is really hard to get a hold of. She said things have changed and you really need an atty as an advocate these days.

I think I should probably withdraw my IEP request for now, until I get the info on exactly what I need to show that my child needs real remediation - I should bring him in and have him read and write for the “nice” people - there’s no question he’s not getting it. The comments by the AP are really scary.

When did you get your help? Are you in the districts of the evil LAUSD?

Our big showdown was the summer after 4th grade and my son is now finishing 10th. We stayed in our district (where I was a special ed teacher) through 8th grade (at my school) where I got a few things for him and was able to make middle school tolerable. My district was a small district in the northeast part of the county. I know people here and there and while some districts are trying to improve instruction, many are business as usual. For high school we moved to take our son to a private school, paying for it ourselves and glad to be away from all the strings and frustrations. Anyway, check into a number of attorneys. Unless things have changed their fees may be reimbursed by the district if the district is found to be out of compliance. If you have not looked at the legal websites available through this site, do so - wright’s law is one. Does your clinic have publically funded kids and can they tell you which advocates seem to place kids there? Withdrawing your IEP request might be a good idea until you get your ducks in a row. Not much happens at school during summer. If you were planning the clinic for summer, go ahead by paying for it yourself if you can, and see about reimbursement. That may be a long shot, so you probably want legal council ASAP.

Thanks Angela. The Center I’m considering - we’re playing phone tag. I got them to say they’ll do reporting to me less formally which will save me at least a couple of hundred dollars. They are contracted with LAUSD, so if it works out this summer maybe when everything is settled he can continue there at the district’s expense. Aren’t I the optimist for a very brief moment! The comments by the schoool AP really concern me - is she truly so ignorant? ANd she’s going to oppose all private options because they’re money making? By the way I mistyped - my son is 16th, not 6th on the SLP’s waiting list for assessment. I also found a Scottish Rite Center nearby - only because I happened to talk to a parent at school about my woes and she told me about it - as if anyone official would- and they have a long waiting list but it can’t hurt.

16th on the list? I’m not that good about legal details, but there is a timeline that starts when you request assessment in writing. I imagine it is the same for SLP, so many days to get the assessment plan signed, so many days to do the assessment, so many days to hold the meeting. Get out your calendar and write down the date you requested in writing, keep all paperwork and document things like “16th on the list”. The district can bring in other SLPs to handle the testing if it is not getting done within the timeline. Do your homework or ask some of the legal whizes on this bb and stay nice but firm. Do your ranting and crying here and hold their feet to the fire.

“Plan 0” at www.crystaltech.com is now, I believe, $7.95/month. (I’ve been really impressed w/ them… ‘way ahead of most as far as things working, me not having to be a technical whiz, & customer service actually knowing how to answer what I ask).
I’ve found that starting small and just adding a little at a time — well, that’s how LDONLine did it — ends up being a very helpful resource. Wati ‘til you see my new design… which, by the way, gets paid for from the PDFs I sell online of some of my stuff. If you want to talk about doing that — it’s pretty straightforward (I have a free e-commerce deal too that works beautifully and just took careful following of directions to set up)
My email’s got extra stuff added but ifyou take that out you can get to me pretty easily :)

I think you have some good points. I also agree that teachers are not trained.

Now, some of these $$$$ programs that you may be advocating need more rigorous study and to be published in peer reviewed journals. Of course, getting folks to do the studies is the problem.

Lastly, I am not convinced most students NEED LiPs. This program is expensive. Frankly I think my students make progress w/o this tres expensive technique with just good teaching.

By the way, I am having good results with Great Leaps.

Oh, and some severely dyslexic youngsters who have double or in my opinion, triple, deficits take a good year or two to get into gear so they can really start to progress. When you have, in my opinion, auditory processing issues, probably visual issues and grapho-motor issues, not to mention memory issues, you have a lot to work through. If parents will allow three years of good teaching in resource (I assume the good teaching is happening), most of the time these students can get going and have made significant progress.

Angela, perhaps practicing resource teachers who have had the time to work through the kinks and have been in a position to bring many students to success should be teaching the courses. Maybe I need to look into this myself. We could do a better job training upcoming teachers than the Ph.D. types who haven’t taught children.

Maybe I’ll put my application into some of the local institutions. They often hire people like us as adjunct staff to teach specific courses.

I totally agree with you. I think that there should be the “this is what will help most kids” plan. If this doesn’t work in a very defined time, then we have alternative, specialized plans.

Some kids have underlying sensory motor deficits that need to be addressed as well.

The difficulty is, of course, that some of our kids are really difficult to remediate. We have done Neuronet therapy with the developer of the program and my son has stumped her at times. She has developed new ways of doing therapy because of him. He has benefited, of course, but so have other children. Kids like him challenge professionals and in my experience only a very few are up to the challenge. For example, I had a Lindamood trained slt tutoring my son last summer. She told me my son had “learned helplessness”. He does not. She couldn’t teach him and so blamed my son.

Beth

You can have a really big effect on education that way—by teaching a course. They don’t pay adjuncts very well, unfortunately, but you could reach a lot of future teachers who could benefit from your experience.

I think “brand” training simply enables a teacher to acquire a bit more quickly a sensible way to teach.

Beth

I promised my son that we would try our best to teach him to read, but if he did not learn we would teach him to cope. It is just that we have spent (I won’t use the word wasted) so much timelooking when the educational community should provide a roadmap, a plan. Just putting a kid in special ed assures almost nothing, in fact worse than nothing, if the teacher is not trained, supported and required to use scientifically based programs. Making a kid feel bad or even making a false happiness, but not really teaching is a sin. My continuing inspriation is my cousin a successful attorney who is blind. No one made him sit on a corner with a cup and a sign. He uses his talents and a lot of guts to get his job done and have the life he wants. With supportive parents like all of us, our kids will be OK.

Before you give up on teaching him to read, let me work with him for a while.

First I’ll send you my how-to’s, simple instructions for a system of teaching reading that works and has worked for over a hundred years (that I know of, starting with my grandmother.) You can try this and see if a light starts to show at the end of the tunnel.

Then if he still isn’t getting it, talk to me about taking a trip your way for a few weeks. Of course I can’t guarantee results 100%, but I don’t quit easily, and sometimes I find out something new that will reach a kid.

I am dead serious about this offer. I like to travel and the cost to you would be a lot less than either a repeat of an expensive program or having to support him not reading for years and years.

But what do you do when resource only offers a slower version of reg ed - Open Court in our case? And it looks like next year the school is going to hire someone with an emergency credential for the resource position - only one newly credentialed candidate applied and wants to be in a different location. Plus the district is pushing for a co-teaching model - how will my child learn with a brand new person and a general ed teacher who was not consulted about this?

You are vey kind and I have enjoyed reading your posts. Let me think about this. I have a few things in the works. I do appreciate your interest and concern.