School suspects learning disabilities - wants to hold back

Boy, this ***really*** doesn’t sound like a good situation for holding back.

Welcome to a new world. Take a deep breath.

I would strongly encourage you to start a paper trail and start thinking like an educated lawyer — not an in-your-face argumentative person, but one who knows the law and is not going to sit back and hope things work out while regulations and standards are being ignored.

Otherwise your daughter will be in fifth grade, feeling utterly out of place, and *still* be weak in reading. (In the meantime, those strong verbal skills will probably have leveled out, since she’s not getting the reading “input” and she’s quite possibly learned that she really isn’t very bright (doesn’t matter whether she is or not) and that not much is expected of her. And because she *is* actually very bright, she’ll be highly frustrated.

(And by the way, the general pattern for social acceptance is that it’s tough to appear younger than your peers and later to puberty if you’re a guy, but equally tough to be the girl who looks older & is hitting puberty ahead of the classroom curve… of course that’s statistically, which doesn’t matter if it’s not you, but it’s worth considering.)

THey “don’t have time” to test her; write them a nice but formal letter asking them to get the process going, and state that until you have the results, it would simply not make sense to make a decision about retaining her. If you can, though, consider an outside evaluation — it will happen faster and probably be better done.

And, if you’re ready, start thinking really “out of the box.” Unfortunately, many school personnel simply flat-out don’t understand how a child can be bright but have difficulty reading. It’s worth figuring out whether there are better places for your child to be.

What problems does she have in reading? Tho’ she’s verbally bright (many girls with dyslexia are), does she have interesting quirks in how she uses language? Or is it strictly a “print doesn’t work” issue — and is larger print easier to handle?

Yeah, what she said. :lol:

Sue about covered it. The written request is very important as it starts a clock ticking. The school only has so many (it varies by state) school days to respond then.

The other thing I would consider is contacting you PTI. Each state must have a “Parent Training & Information” organization to…well…train and inform parents of special education law. These are federally funded. Some do a lot of outside fundraising and really do a good job. Others are more scaled down. Ohio’s PTI’s are

Ohio
OCECD (PTI)
Bank One Building
165 West Center St., Suite 302
Marion, OH 43302-3741
740-382-5452 Voice & TDD
740-383-6421
1-800-374-2806
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.ocecd.org
Statewide except SW Region

Ohio
OCECD (PTI-Early Childhood)
Bank One Building
165 West Center St., Suite 302
Marion, OH 43302-3741
740-382-5452 Voice & TDD
740-383-6421
1-800-374-2806
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.ocecd.org
Southwest Ohio

At the very least they should be able to point you to sources of state law.

Here is the link to a paper of the National Association of School Psychologists. Bottom line? Retention is generally NOT beneficial.

http://www.nasponline.org/information/pospaper_graderetent.html

Welcome to the board!

Barb

Hmmmmmmmmm….

I just noticed that there are two PTIs listed for Ohio, both with the exact same address. Must be an error in the database.

In any case, I’m sure if you contact the one listed they can direct you to the proper place.

Barb

If they haven’t tested her then they haven’t any plan for her. Another year of not getting the right teaching won’t help.

I would only agree to retention if there was some great remedial program that was really helping my child and it wasn’t going to be available at the next grade level.

Put the testing request in writing. Our child was tested during the summer. You might be surprised what they can do if you put it in writing.

But retaining our child with no tests and plans in place would be a no go for us.

good luck.

until next year. Many school districts have what they call HUMP day…which means that any assessment requests after that day can be delayed until the start of the next year and have to be done within the first 30 days of the year.

What I would do is start her with a good reading tutor over the summer. Someone who really knows what they are doing. .Try the book Reading Reflex if you want to do it yourself. You can do books on tape, Also read naturally has some great products for reading fluency but it sounds like she needs more work on the decoding piece.

I never held my kiddo back, instead I spent $$ and time on remediation. On the other hand I have seen some 16 year old kids in 8th grade who technically have been held back twice..guess what…it didn’t fix the problem…Remediation is what fixes the problem not retention.

I think holding back might be effective if the issue were immaturity of some sort or a rough time during the early years-a premie, a child who spent much time in the hospital, etc

But if she is verbally astute, immaturity is unlikely to be the problem

She would do better in 2nd gr next year if she repeated 2nd grade-I mean, that’s inevitable with a second go around. And teachers tend to think highly of that easily observed outcome but its NOT a long term solution and thats what you really want

There is no OBJECTIVE long term evidence to support retention

I agree with remediating her over the summer and doing what it takes to have that testing done first thing in the school year.

Ditto to what everyone else said!

I would never consider retaining a child without a comprehensive evaluation. Only if there were significant social immaturity, and the belief that retention might give her some breathing room - while they remediate!- would it even possibly be a good idea.

Bright LD children don’t learn any better the 2nd time around if the methods don’t change.

<<Bright LD children don’t learn any better the 2nd time around if the methods don’t change.>>

That is absolutely correct!! Something that all teachers need to remember…

Second the idea to get a good tutor over the summer. Try to find someone who is knowledgeable about language and reading, who just doesn;t do more of the same of what failed in the school, and in a summer you can often see things really turn around. It will still take time and hard work, but if you decicate some effort you will get reslts.

Thank you all for your replies. I feel much better now, and I will draft a letter requesting testing and that they not retain her. It just didn’t “sound” right to me that they would want to hold her back now. Her teacher has sent notes home saying she has improved, and in the first meeting we’d had they had said they would send her to 3rd grade and test her at the beginning of the year. I just couldn’t see why they changed their minds, and why they wouldn’t want to figure out what the problem was before making such a big decision.

My daughter is already at least a head above her class in height, and she has even started the early signs of puberty - this alone makes me believe it would be highly detrimental to her emotional health to hold her back a year.

As far as her reading goes, she had been diagnosed with eye teaming problems about 3 years ago, and the doctor said it was minor enough that she should grow out of it. I will be taking her back to have her re-evaluated. I believe that some of her problem was prior inadequate instruction on the decoding part - i.e. sounding out words and/or sight word recognition. The more she practices, the better she gets. She gets frustrated with harder things, and I think it is a personality thing in that when she is faced with something difficult, she gives up almost immediately instead of trying. Also, she gets bored because her interest level is higher than her reading ability - so the things she is given to read are boring, yet the things she’s interested in are too “hard” for her to read on her own.

Well, thank you all for listening and for the advice and info!

When you’re bright, it’s easy to stop doing the hard stuff and focus on the easy (let’s face it, if working hard at something has people tell you “you should have tried harder,” but there’s stuff that you don’t have to think about at all and they say “oh, this is wonderful” — which are you going to focus on?) . So for one last bit of advice, be sure to praise effort and hard work, not just those natural gifts & talents. When you praise the natural gifts & talents, try to tie that into effort, too — a consistent message that it’s not just what you’re given, it’s what you do with what you’ve got can go a long way in the long run.
And feel free to keep coming back :-)

Definitely look for a reading tutor for over the summer. Someone who can work with your DD at her own pace and tailor the instruction to your DS’s needs. Don’t depend on the school to do this. IMO, most if not all LD kids desperately need a Cadillac education and what they get, at best, is a Ford Pinto education.

One thing to add to this excellent advice regarding not retaining this bright child.

If she has an unremediated vision problem this may be why she shuns reading. My son had this problem, we did all the phonemic awareness stuff and got him to be an excellent decoder but even when he could read he didn’t want to. His ocular motor issues made reading uncomfortable. His eyes just didn’t focus well or scan the page well.

I was told by an opthamologist that he would outgrow these issues but he just didn’t. Addressing these issues through vision therapy made a difference but for a child who can’t decode VT isn’t enough, you need to specifically teach them how to decode.

We used reading reflex but there are some other excellent programs. She will need an intense, consistant program to catch up.

Does hooked on phonics work well to teach decoding?
What do you use when you can’t afford tutors? How do you know when you are pushing too hard?

I bought the book reading reflex and taught him myself. I spent a fortune on tutors and sylvan that was just money down the drain.

I know there are great tutors out there but you have to know what to look for and when we started this journey I had no clue.

VT was covered %80 by my insurance. I have aetna ppo.

I had oxford hmo originally and could not get anything covered through them.

My son sounds a bit like your daughter. He is very good verbally but struggled with the written page.

Hooked on Phonics is simply not enough. It is a little additional boost which can help a child who has most of the basics and just needs a little fill-in, but it falls short of a complete program. It is also terribly overpriced for the amount that is in it.

You can buy a set of workbooks that contain ten times the teaching material of HOP for twenty to thirty dollars; the particular series I use (not the only one, just a good time-tested tool) is Check and Double Check Phonics available from scholarschoice.ca (note the .ca) You can also buy the book Reading Reflex for around twenty dollars and use the instructions in it to make up your own materials. Either or both will go a lot further.

As well as *any* phonics program, you need basic readers to practice; NOT guessing and getting frustrated over library books, but a planned series of developmental readers. You ned to build up that skill in small steps. I have my own time-tested choices, and there are many others out there.

If you are interested in my how-to-tutor notes, no strings attached, just email me at [email protected]

Someone on here mentioned a series of books recently, it might have been Nancy, that can be used to teach reading.

Victoria are you aware of some.

My son in leaving k loves to read Dick and Jane but I would like to get him something systematic and phonics based. I have the Bob books but would like something more substantial and interesting.

He isn’t dyslexic but I think even for a child like this phonics basics are important.

Personally I have yet to find a series that is both phonetically based and readable. The phonetically-based series that I have seen have horribly artificial sentences and they go too fast, introducing vocabulary way faster than the kid can assimilate it.

So I have gone for readable and I use books, like the Dick and Jane but even more detailed, that teach high-frequency words; I just teach those high-frequency words phonetically, getting the best of both worlds.
The books I use are the *old* Ladybird readers numbers 1a, 1b through 6a, 6b. They are available through penguin.uk (note the uk)

I have heard here and other places about series of decodable readers; haven’t seen them so I don’t know how badly they carry on the flaws mentioned above. One series often praised here is the RALP books and another is a reprint of the very old Sullivan Readers. You can try a web search under those names, or you can use the Search option on this board — websites for these two have been mentioned here in the past.

Thanks Victoria,
I agree with your assessment of what is available. I will look for those Ladybird books.
You know, I bet you would do a good job of developing your own series.

Here is the most extensive set of decodable readers I have seen. I am using them along with an explicit decoding program, but it introduces sounds at the beginning of each story and then the sounds are used in words in the text. It originally was a complete reading program.

http://www.usu.edu/teach/LittleBooks.htm

It is called the [b]Reading for All Learners program[/b], also known as RALP. It has little books that start at K level and goes up through mid-3rd.

Janis

Thanks Janis!

I guess I should have added I live in a high cost area, Washington DC, and if you live in a less expensive area your costs should be lower.

Well, I went to the website and looked at the sample RALP reader. All I can say is that I have seen worse.
The sample they give is “book” number 21, and it is still pre-primer level, meaning you have to go through thirty or more of these before you even get into something resembling a story. The sentences still have the forced unnatural structure problem. There is zero plot or action. The cartoons are not too great. And, the worst thing of all, there is very very little actual connected reading to a heck of a lot of blank paper and weak cartoon — fewer than ten words on a page. I put “book” in quotation marks because the whole thing could be contained on one page in fairly large print.
There are some good points, nice clear print and practice vocabulary lists and a planned structure, but I wouldn’t spend very much money on these.

I wonder if the phonics stories that go with the K-12 curriculum are available on their own (I bet if there were a market, they’d sell ‘em that way :)). They had plot & everything :)

Well I share Victoria’s views in some ways. OTOH, it is nice to have some “outside” reading for really severe dyslexic kids. I just put some Bob books on a chair next to my one student (this was months ago), he is just 9 and a “young” nine at that. He was so excited he could actually read something.

—des

Sue,

I was at the pool the other day and a mom had a book I really liked. She said it was a hooked on phonics book. Apparantly you have to buy the whole hop program to get them. The hop program is expensive.

Thank you for all the info. I did find some books at the library that Bekka finds interesting, and seem to have a good mix of words she knows by sight and words that she can decode with a little work. I have an appointment for her eyes to be checked coming up, so we’ll see what happens with that.

I am thinking of writing some children’s books now, being that it is so frustrating to find something that is actually interesting enough to capture my daughter’s imagination and attention, yet easy enough for her to not become utterly frustrated while reading!

I got Hooked on Phonics from the library, so it didn’t cost anything for the basic program. I am using it as a supplement. Bekka seems to be doing really well when she is interested in something, and surprises me at how much she really does know and can do - which makes me wonder why on earth the school wants to hold her back. The thing that seems to stunt her is that she gets EASILY frustrated and just gives up, so part of me thinks that she may just need a little more 1 on 1 time and attention right now. I know most kids her age tend to be doing a lot on their own, but she just isn’t one of those kids! We’ll see, I guess.

Alicia