Testing finally completed again

Working memory issues can be an important sign of ADHD. Also, premature children are a much higher risk for ADHD. That said, it can be hard to distinguish LD from ADHD and prematurely born children are also a higher risk for LD. Are they taking services away? Do you think your child’s issues are caused by LD and not ADHD? Its not clear from your post.

Polly,

I don’t have any information on memory, however I may be able to point you towards a less expensive advocacy option. There is a Federally mandated organization that advocates for disabilily rights, including special education. The website is: http://www.napas.org/default.asp

This site will connect you to the chapter in your state. They may be able to provide low cost/no cost advocacy for you.

Good luck!

You may want to consider ditching the expensive advocate and putting the money into direct remediation. You can expend a lot of time, energy and money and end up only with mediocre accommodations — too little, and too late.

Cognitive skills training can help develop working memory. PACE (http://www.processingskills.com ) is a good provider-based program. Audiblox (http://www.audiblox2000.com ) and BrainSkills (home version of PACE, http://www.brainskills.com ) are good home-based programs.
All of these programs work on strengthening a wide range of cognitive skills — things such as attention, sequencing, directionality, visual processing, pattern recognition, logic and reasoning, auditory and visual short-term memory, etc.

A program such as PACE trains all aspects of attention that are trainable — e.g., ability to sustain attention, ability to sustain attention in the presence of distractions, and ability to multi-task.

Cognitive skills programs work best when underlying deficits have already been addressed as much as possible — e.g., auditory therapy for auditory processing disorders, occupational therapy for sensory integration disorder, and/or vision therapy for problems with visual efficiency skills. Any deficit in these areas can delay cognitive skills acquisition.

Nancy

I agree with Nancy. With the best advocate in the world, you probably still won’t get what your child needs through the school. They just don’t give the one-on-one specialized instruction most kids need with these kinds of problems. I use my own child’s IEP to get accommodations, but I do the remediation outside of school.

Janis

If the psychologist is seeing ADD it must be there. I know how frustrating it is to know a child tests out ADD and the parents won’t listen.

I would be wary of hiring an advocate because you should be spending the money on remediation and teaching her strategies to deal with her ADD.

A teacher can’t compete with the ADD off topic and tangential conversations a child with ADD has going on in their brain while the teacher is trying to teach. I don’t feel it is fair to blame a teacher for her ADD behaviors and memory issues especially if you are choosing to not address them when they have been found by a psychologist who has tested her.

>>If the psychologist is seeing ADD it must be there.

If only that were true! I have seen many mis-diagnoses of ADD from well-meaning professionals, and psychologists are not exempt from that problem. Since symptoms of ADD can arise from underlying deficits such as visual efficiency problems and auditory processing disorders, a diagnosis of ADD should be made only after other possibilities are ruled out. Since psychologists are not qualified to evaluated visual efficiency or auditory processing, they often mistakenly diagnose ADD even when the other possibilities have not been ruled out.

The problem then becomes one of a child being inappropriately medicated (with poor results), and the underlying deficits never being diagnosed, much less addressed.

Nancy

Please note that the SCHOOL tested the child — not an independent psych with no need to crunch numbers. I don’t fault the schools for this — they have an impossible job in many cases, especially with kids who need ‘more’ than the average.

‘Been There’, you are wrong — you may be carrying baggage from taking unfair ‘blame and shame’ in another situation, but that does not mean that any parent who fails to see ADD behaviours at home and at play is ‘WRONG’! Yes, I realize these parents exist — but I don’t think this is the case here.

Though my child remains a dreamy artist who HATES academics and therefore is a chore to keep ‘on task’ at school, once we got tubes in his ears so he could HEAR the teacher, and got some intensive one-on-one phonics instruction so he could READ…by Grade 5, even his teachers stopped saying ‘ADD’…what if I’d listened to the psych in grade 2 who couldn’t be wrong??????????????

When my connors scale was widely different from the teacher’s, they smirked and inferred that I had skewed my answers…because, of course, if the psych and teacher said ADD, it MUST be, right??? WRONG. And no, I don’t blame his teachers for not being able to keep him on task, either! I KNOW my kid…maybe Polly3K knows hers, too!

Even good, competent people may make mistakes from time to time. Good, competent people will admit this.
And there are an awful lot of people out there who are neither good nor competent, and the less they feel secure in their knowledge the more they feel threatened by any disagreement that they take as a challenge to their authority. People with insecurities who want to feel like big frogs in small puddles may gravitate to what they see as safe jobs in schools.
All of this leads to the fact that school diagnoses of almost anything are to be taken with a huge grain of salt.
First find someone who actually knows more than you about the field and is up-to-date in their reading and who takes an approach of trying to help the child, and then get their considered opinion. This considered opinion may *not* be a simple one-word catch-all diagnosis, but a list of other things to test for and eliminate or try treating, but that’s what you ge twhen you really look at all the options.

that work in the public schools? The teachers I work with are always looking for ways to reach the kids. We learn from each other, spend lots of money on workshops to hone our craft.

I have seen parents blame the teacher.

obviously, this has happened in your experience — and I’m sure it happens occasionally in every school. In our school we have one parent whose child is a HUGE behaviour problem – so the the mom, and she drives the teachers and the administration nuts cuz it is NEVER her kid, though all teachers, parents, admin, and the JANITOR know it IS her kid…and I’m talking SERIOUS issues in this child!

In polly3k’s case, I don’t think this what is going on — more likely a situation we see all too often: an LD/dyslexic child whom is being written off as ADD in a system that has NO WAY to help — just like my son’s school. (and ask the ADD parents how much ‘help’ being dx’d ADD will get you, unless your meds work a charm and your parents can pay for catch-up remediation outside school!) The people involved are caring professionals like yourself — but overworked and undersupported, as well as poorly informed due to misinformation and underfunding in an organizational culture that treats children as products, even though that is not the INTENT of the people who are ‘in charge’ of that culture.

I don’t think the type of parent you speak of is likely to EVER come to this site, or search for answers as polly3k is doing, especially since many parents come here in response to a school recommendation — not likely the type of parent you mention would listen to anything the teacher or administration had to say! Your viewpoint is valid in some cases — but in this case, I strongly believe, it is not.

Of COURSE, your post is important and valuable and you should never hesitate to post as you did — for there may come a time when you are RIGHT — plus, it is essential that a wide variation of opinion be presented in response to queries like Polly3k’s, in order that she has access to the best information available. BUT…if I disagree, I’ll disagree! In the end, it is Polly3k who will decide whose opinion best applies to HER child — and that is as it should be. Best regards to you!

I am not sure who is replying to what, although ‘been there’ seems to have completely missed my point.

I was trying to say that just because one or two “experts” say a kid is ADD that does not mean that the diagnosis is definitely true, and especially if the parent has doubts it is important to be cautious of “experts” and to explore all avenues — exactly what Elizabeth TO has done herself so I’m not sure who she is agreeing or disagreeing with.
The child might really be ADD, or one or more other issues might have been completely missed. I don’t know and nobody can say until a thorough checkup has been done, and even then it may be difficult to sort out all the issues.

I put the word experts in quotation marks because over the years I have some to realize that a lot of people making these diagnoses are in fact unqualified.

I wasn’t saying anything about classroom teachers in general, have met bith very good and very bad and everything in between.

but not slamming teachers either! I think the ‘SYSTEM’ sometimes eats children AND teachers…!