Learning Disabilities Part 7: How to Pursue Intervention for Your Child.
How to pursue school intervention services for your child could be a book in itself. While it’s more than I can cover here, I will throw out a few bits of advice.
You may find professional help and advocacy for your child at school. Or you may discover the school minimizes your child’s learning challenges, fails to provide useful intervention, or tells you they are not required to help with your child’s learning disabilities.
If you have the means, consider moving your child to a private school. Or seek disability specific help from private services outside the school system. Both of these options are clearly expensive, and often out of reach for many families.
If you disagree with your schools assessment of your child you can ask for an outside Independent Educational Evaluation (IEE). This is done at the school district’s expense, and you have the legal right to request this one time.
If the school refuses to authorize this second opinion assessment or IEE, then you may wind up paying enormous sums for an independent educational evaluation and a lawyer to make the school meet their obligations to your child. In fact, a whole network of consulting educational psychologists and lawyers specialize in these cases.
If they find that your child does indeed have a learning challenge that the schools are required to address, then you can ask the court to order the reimbursement of the costs you’ve incurred in assessing, treating, and lawyering-up. This, of course, requires that you have the time and money to pay for the services up front and hope for reimbursement.
The complex child assessment process is one that parents generally have no experience with. The schools and the people who conduct these assessments, however, have been through them many times. They are familiar with the procedures, the meetings, and the implications of various conclusions.
At the same time, they may be grossly misinformed and uneducated about learning differences. Really. Truly. Most principals and educators simply have not kept up with the neurobiological science of learning disabilities. You’re expecting them to be experts. They may sound like experts while making huge errors.
For this reason, it is very helpful if you can bring someone with you to the meetings. Preferably, someone who has been through the system before. You should record all meetings with the school on a cell phone. You’re allowed to do this if you inform them in advance, so they can make their own recording.
Research your legal rights, and the obligations of the schools. Look for local parenting support groups that can point you towards resources, and seek out the most knowledgeable person you can find to help you advocate for you child.
A dear friend of mine is an educational psychologist. At some point she realized her children had dyslexia. Imagine her frustration when she had to push for her kids to get an assessment, and was unable to get the public school system…that she worked for…to provide the intervention her kids needed! Ultimately, she pulled her kids from public school and found outside dyslexia tutoring for them.
Previously a strong advocate for public schooling, she now works the other side. Frankly, you could not ask for a fiercer advocate for children and families struggling with learning differences.
When one of my children needed an assessment, my friend kindly went over the test results with me. She pointed out that one of the most important tests, based on our concerns, was administered incorrectly. It was truly invalid information due to how it was conducted. Nevertheless, the school presented this as evidence of lack of problems in this area.
I have a master’s degree in medical science, but I would never have known the specifics of how a particular psychoeducational test needed to be conducted. Furthermore, they presented a whole group of test results using the wrong scale! This artificially shifted some results from “low” to “average” and created a false impression of how my child was doing.
When confronted, they clearly knew they were using the wrong scale, but refused to admit it created a false result. I promise you that virtually no one, other than an educational psychologist or school tester, is going to know what scale needs to be used on every test. Without my friend’s informed review of the testing, my lawyer husband and I might have agreed with the school that things looked kind of okay.
Most parents are not going to have an educational psychologist in their back pocket. So, be aware that you may be well out of your element. If you feel the school has missed something or is glossing over your concerns, then try to hire an expert to review test results with you.
Be aware, if your child has had an educational assessment through the school system, the educational psychologist who works for the schools will help define any learning differences they find. (They can miss a lot!) Unfortunately, they often don’t include recommendations for best interventions for your child. If they did then the school system would be obligated to purchase and provide those specific interventions.
If your child has dyslexia, the school system may say they have a program for that. However, the program your school currently uses may not be the best one for your child’s specific dyslexic challenges. This stuff is studied. There’s data on what teaching systems work best for different kinds of learning differences. Your child doesn’t need just any old something thrown at them. They need the correct specific intervention.
Furthermore, many children have a mix of different learning differences, and some programs may combine approaches better than others. But, the school system may be strapped for money, and not want to invest in purchasing a new program for your child. If they can’t prove that what they have fits your child’s needs, then they are required to provide it in some way. They can purchase and learn a new intervention. They can pay to send your child to a specialized school or for outside specialty services.
The big challenge here is that you won’t know what interventions might be best. You can ask the school psychologist to make specific recommendations with links to what data show these will be best. Or, you can get an opinion from a consulting educational psychologist from outside the school system.
This stuff is not easy for parents to handle. It’s very costly in time and money, and unaffordable for many families. I am truly stunned by the obstacles some school systems will create to prevent a child from learning. Even free accommodations like extra time for children with slow processing, dyslexia, or dyscalculia can be refused despite overwhelming evidence that it’s appropriate for a child.
However, it does not have to be this way. I have also worked with schools who genuinely understand learning differences and variations in child development. Within the constraints of the public school system, they have set up environments that support the wide range of needs in a classroom. There are schools that listen to findings from educational assessments and work to address each child’s needs. Finding these schools is extremely hard and rare in my experience.
Certainly, school funding that was not based on local property taxes would even the playing field a bit. However, even very well funded schools can get it all wrong. We need teachers and administrators who have been educated in learning differences and have the freedom to build a better way.
Kathleen Cawley is a physician assistant and author. She is a regular guest columnist for the Auburn Journal and Folsom Telegraph where she writes on parenting and childhood. Her books, Navigating the Shock of Parenthood: Warty Truths and Modern Practicalities — from a mom with twins, And Grandma Becky’s Blue Tongue, a children’s picture book, are available where books are sold.
