My son is 14 and just got his GORT results back - of course I can’t find the scores but the four scores were between <1 and 10%!!! Can’t get much worse than that.
Any way he is on an IEP and instead of reading instruction on the IEP, they are offering Title 1 reading instruction. Any thoughts?
Re: Title 1 Reading
Sue,
Thanks for your comments and questions. He has been identified as having a language based learning disability but his GORT scores reflect the struggle that he continues to have as he is about to enter high school. He is in all regular education classes at my insistence although they exempted him from a foreign language so that he would receive daily learning center support.
My understanding is that Title 1 reading support is a regular education intervention so will it be enough for a student who has been on an IEP for six years? At home he uses alot of technology to bypass his struggles but I still want the school to work on remediation.
Re: Title 1 Reading
Sadly, if they have not remediated hinm in six years, I wouldn’t hold out much hope that they’ll start now. Most schools simply don’t know how. If it were me, I’d do a private reading eval and get a very good reading tutor and have intensive reading therapy over the summer and then continue on weekly as long as necessary. There are excellent articles on this site under LD In Depth/reading that will tell you names of adequate multi-sensory structured language reading programs. Wilson and Language! are two often used with older kids. I like Lindamood-Bell very much as well.
Janis
Re: Title 1 Reading
Under ideal conditions, it’s probably not enough — but it’s strange enough for them to have a Title I person so I’d check it out. Odds are, unfortunately, that it’s a political necessity because they have bad test scores, and they’ve hired somebody who goes through the motions.
Has there been intensive remediation before?
Do they know what his reading deficit is?
It all depends on the Title 1 instructor and whether his/her methods match his needs.
Odds are good that the Title 1 instructor knows more about teaching reading than the special ed instructors. The big question is whether her training in reading taught her the stuff that will help him.
You have tough choices here. Try to find out just what the TItle 1 teacher does. If (as most of the folks working on reading with older students do) s/he Tries To Make Reading More Interesting, and Gives Them Meaningful Reading Practice — but there’s no actual specific instruction in either decoding or comprehension — then you have to figure out whether it will be worth his while going at all. It could be — allies are hard to come by when you’re 14 so if they get along, even if all he gets is exposure to interesting literature, it could be the highlight of his day. On the other hand, if it’s perceived by the social structures as Special, then it could be just one more major humiliation (when you’re fourteen, generally no humiliation is minor) every day.
How are his other skills and knowledge? Is he in regular classes and doing okay? Or are they babysitting him and passing him through or failing him through? How does he feel about school and the whole blooming world?