HELP!!

The young girl has rights to a free and appropriate education. You first need to meet with the public school counselor and a member of your district’s special education staff for help. They should be able to get you into contact with support people and give you some ideas of ways to help appropriately. If, as is the case in many districts, they are unable or unwilling to provide you clear answers and possible interventions suited to her future needs, you need to hook up with an advocate. You are not alone. Ken Campbell

I had to post your your message. I have a son who I thought had LD, but the more tests we did, we found out that he has Mild Cognative Disabilities. He is getting the help he needs, but he will always struggle academically. Just like your niece, he is has such a kind disposition. Very helpful, loving, caring. No emotional problems, and for someone to tell me that my son is “mentally Retarded”, is beyond me. Yet, his test scores show that he is a “Slow learning”. But I will not have anyone tell me that he will never be able to graduate…..I believe in him, and he will always believe in himself.
I have come to the conclusion that most parents will put away for their kids College funds, and I am spending that money just so my son can learn to read. Someone said to me on this board a while back that the worst thing you can do to a cognitive child is put him in a river where the current’s going a bit too fast, and expect that somehow, eventually, he’ll get strong enough to swim in it.
Go slow with your niece. Get to the basics first. Get testing done, and like Ken said, go to the school, go to “Wrights Law”, find out what support you can give her. You can be her strong advocate!

What a wonderful and caring person you are to be doing this!

I suggest that you request (in a letter to the school) full-assessment testing. You can find drafts for this type of letter by doing a search on Google with something like “IEP letter.” Do this right away so you can get the results as quickly as possible.

Once you have the test results that will give you a better idea of her specific strengths and weaknesses. This may help you in figuring out the best way she learns as well as where to direct her future.

Let me give you an example. My son has tremedous difficulty memorizing words and vocabulary. Last year in the middle of the year his school started assigning VERY DIFFICULT vocabulary lists. Even with nightly practice my son failed every test (he was lucky to get one or two correct!).

One thing testing revealed is my son has strong visual-spacial skills. So, this year I decided to try making his vocabulary more visual-spacial. For each word we sat together and came up with clever little drawings (not an easy task for me!). For example, for “geyser” I drew a “guy” standing over a hole where water shot up and gave him a “surprise” (guy-sur). “delta” was a woman named delta holding a fan (that looked like a delta) decorated with plants and silt. These little drawings made a huge difference! My son only got two wrong!!!! And those were wrong only because he got mixed up by the wording of the answers. He knew the two terms.

I don’t know if any of this information will help you with your niece, but testing should hopefully give you a place to start.

This is an awesome board, it is nice to see it again picking up speed, we’ve got to get the word out that the board is back and it is once again easy to post messages. Ken

Hollymay: yes, you are doing a good thing. Hang in there.

You need to get at this on three fronts, school administration, legal, and what is actually educational.

School administration: WRITTEN, DATED request for full evaluation and IEP meeting. Deliver by hand and talk to the secretary a bit so there is absolutely no question it was received by the school. Be polite, bite your tongue, but be firm. Once the school gets this written request for evaluation, the clock starts ticking and they have legal deadlines to meet.
When you get to the IEP meeting, be informed about what is legally required and what is needed, and puch (politely,l but firmly) for what is really needed, not what is convenient for the school.

Legal: go to the other pages on this board and to the Wrightslaw site and find out what your rights are and what and when the school is required to do. Caution — it is possible to waste four or five years on legal battles, and at the end even if you “win”, the kid is out of that school and into high school still never having been taught — not much of a win. So try as hard as possible to work on cooperation and negotiation. Also be realistic; the school board has to work with the money and people they have and you aren’t ever likely to get the ideal, just make sure she gets something workable.

What’s actually educational: Two issues — where to start and what to do.
I like the swimming in a river analogy above. If you take a child slowly through the shallow end of the pool this year and the deep end next year and a calm lake the year after that and finally the river three or four years from now, sure they will be able to swim in the strong current. But if you just drop the kid off the end of the dock and yell “Swim! Swim! You should know how to swim by your age!”, the kid is certainly not going to learn how to swim and is very likely to develop a fear of water and will never swim even in a back yard pool.
You have been trying to teach multiplication facts 6x4. But have you checked whether she can even add yet? Whether she can even count yet? One of the worst examples I ever worked with was a boy age 12 with a genetic disorder whom the school claimed to have taught multiplication up to the three times table — except when I worked with him and went back and back to find out what he actually had mastered, I finally found he could not count accurately past six. 3 x 8 = 24 is going to make a lot of sense when you don’t know what a number over six looks like!
In both reading and math, you have to start where she is and *then* move forward. If she is at Level 2, starting at Level 4 is going to be a disadster and teach failure. (How would you yourslef do in my calculus class?) I constantly ask people which is better, to fail Grade 3 three times and still be failing, or to work through Grades 1, 2 and 3 and be passing in the same amount of time?
On the other hand, you do have to avoid the trap of doing the same beginner stuff over and over and over just to keep looking busy; you need programs that move forward at a slow but steady pace.
Your school MAY if you are lucky have a good special ed program and good teachers who will actually teach. Howev er a lot of schools just don’t know what to do with the kid who needs real teaching and doesn;t pick things up automatically on her own. If you are in the unlucky majority, you will need to do tutoring yourself or hire a tutor. You have already been spending this time unsuccessfully; inform yourself about programs and methods that work and spend the same time on productive teaching. Forget yelling about homework that she can’t do and that isn’t teaching anything, and focus on things that will get her where she needs to be.

Many people on this board will recommend a number of good programs to you. It would help to find out what her actual academic level is and what her problems/diagnoses are.
I will be happy to send you my free how-to-tutor notes, collected from previous posts on this board. Just email me at [email protected]

One other thing she could do first is to get a copy of the child’s special ed. records and have someone look through and see exactly what testing has been already done. I don’t necessarily agree that they need to start over and retest the child completely. But she does need someone who can explain what is there so she understands the child’s learning abilities, strengths, and weakenesses and possible appropriate placements. It is not appropriate for ANY child to be spending 4-5 hours a night on homework. She may not have prior skills in place to even be doing multiplication. I’d want to see all the test scores from the previous school and go from there.

(Ken, it’s great to see you here more often, too!)

Janis

Do a hand written request for an IEP then with in 30 days by law they will begin testing. next thing you should do is find a special ed advocate. You can find them online but also check with the school district to get names of advocates that have work with the school. They will know what tricks the school may try to pull. Have the advocate review with you the past iep and results of test do they match up with what you are seeing your neice doing? Show the advocate some of the shcool work she has done. then go to the meeting togather do not go alone have the advocate there. this is going to help and it is for the rest of your niece’s life! Make sure the schools do their part. good luck and god bless you!!!!