I am a frequent reader and infrequent poster, but I wanted to share my “success” with you. Our son, Andrew, was in the public school system in Wash., DC from Kindergarten through 2nd grade. He was diagnosed with specific learning disabilities (primarily speech/language based) and ADHD, both from testing the school performed and private testing we arranged. He had an IEP and was receiving OT, speech language, and special ed during 1st and 2nd grade. In 2nd grade we also arranged for him to receive private OT, 3 sessions of private speech/language and Phonographix per week, and one private tutoring session per week. The poor kid worked so hard that year! Even with all this support, he couldn’t keep up with his class. However, the school wanted to promote him to 3rd grade, a sure-fire set up for failure.
We are extremely fortunate to live in a city that has a couple of schools for children with learning disabilities. These schools have waiting lists miles long. We were also fortunate that one of the schools, Kingsbury, thought that our son would be a perfect fit for the program and had 6 spaces opening up in his age range. He started last fall in an ungraded class of 7 childen and 2 special ed teachers.
We hired an attorney (we already had a special ed advocate on board) and went through the process of trying to get funding. I posted here about this frustrating experience earlier this year. The hearing officer, after 3 full days of testimony from Andrew’s private speech/language teacher, special ed advocate, etc., decided that the public school was providing Andrew with an appropriate program. She neglected to take into account the $20,000 of private services we were paying out of pocket to help keep him afloat.
We proceeded to appeal the decision. Last month, when our attorney went to a scheduling meeting with the judge and the public school attorneys, the judge strongly urged the public school attorneys to go to mediation with us, because if the case came before her, they would lose. She noted that parents don’t place kids in these LD schools unless they had to and that it appeared to her that Andrew was not able to function in a public school environment.
Last week we went into mediation. The upshot is that we have been awarded full funding for this past school year, including the additional speech/language and OT services, and a “stay put” clause that will allow him to stay in the school for subsequent years, unless DC comes up with a better placement (which is unlikely). We are very pleased to finally get the funding. In return we had to waive being reimbursed for attorney’s fees and for all the private services he had during 1st and 2nd grade.
The victory is not so sweet though. We shouldn’t have had to go through so much to get funding — thousand of dollars in lawyer’s fees and advocate’s fees, mortgaging our house to the max to pay this year’s tuition, and so on.
I read all the posts about parents fighting with the public school system to get the proper services. We also went through this before realizing that even though the public school tried hard to provide him with services, they were inconsistently delivered and of poor quality. And this is the best public school in DC for special ed.
This last year has been very good for Andrew. Although he could have been pushed harder on the academics, his self-esteem and social skills have flourished. He has become much more self sufficient and self-motivated.
And this weekend, he finally learned to ride a bike! 9 and a half years old! I am so proud of him.
What a great post! Thanks for sharing.