Need Advice-Educational Issues with my 8yo 3rd Grader

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As some of you may already know, I withdrew my daughter from public school after they consistently refused to provide supports for her. That was 1st grade. She was extremely anxious, withdrawn and mute in public school and regressed academically while there.

At the beginning of second grade I moved her to a small Montessori-type private academy. She seemed to do well academically, but did not make up the regression in reading. Math was her strongest academic subject and in 2nd grade she made straight A's (with a lot of support from her teacher).

Now I must explain that this small school has no concept of special education or Asperger's. The director has extensive education background, also has background in Speech Pathology, and she herself has a child with anxiety/school issues. I spoke to her at great length about my daughter, gave her the diagnostic testing, and was confident they had it under control.

In 2nd grade, while the techer was nurturing and attentive, she was "clueless" about the social anxiety my daughter displayed. All throughout the year my daughter had school refusal issues. They reported that she was "fine" at school (same thing the public school always said) but when I picked her up often times she was upset and practically running away from the school, agitated and upset. Every morning she would cry about not wanting to go to school.

This year, the school refusal is back to full swing. However, now I have additional problems. She is failing academically. This is especially worrisome in math (her favorite subject). She seems to be shutting down and is refusing math, which she used to love and boast that she was "good" at. So now she is not reading and math skills are deteriorating as well.

I feel as if I burned some bridges at the public school-at the time I thought there was NO WAY we would ever go back there but now I am wondering if she REALLY needs some special ed help. I wonder if now I could put her in public school and pay the $$ I am currently paying on private school towards a tutor. However, I KNOW public school would be a sensory/social anxiety nightmare for her.

She has a high IQ (in superior range) but she has a drastic difference between her verbal IQ and performance IQ-which I don't quite understand but feel this MUST be part of this issue.

I feel like I need to find some help for her and I keep weighing the pros and cons of this private school. I haven't yet met with the math teacher and wonder if she even knows my daughter's AS background at all. I feel like a meddling mother to constantly step in and have to "school" these teachers but what else can I do? It seems the director never relays the information about my daughter to the teachers.

Sorry, just rambling here. I am hoping someone can help me brainstorm on what I should do here. We are really suffering with horrible afterschool afternoons with hours of homework frustration. I feel like I am actually doing the teaching (a very poor job) and school is just very expensive "daycare".

Please note: I AM NOT A PARENT. I do, however, live the life of a person on the spectrum.

Six hours (or longer) is a long time to be "ON" without decompress or alone time. There are certain tricks. For example, you can sit in the back and doodle as you half listen. That sounds bad. But some classes are just boring. Or, more constructively, you can do the math homework in math class as you half listen to the lecture. Somehow this multi-tasking is a downshift in energy and works as a partial break. What really uses a lot of energy is trying to laser beam focus on the lecture.

So, this is kind of the method of less is more. This is arcing across a topic, staying up with it or even ahead, and not laser beaming in and super focusing on the details.

Now, socially, when I was a child, I organized tag games, picnics, backyard carnivals. As an adult, I realize I'm often effective as a low-key leader. What I'm not great at is 'hanging out' or small talk at a party. So, I could do either a pale shadow of these skills, or the skills I'm good at and really interested in anyway. I mean, leadership often has the more direct, straightforward skills anyway. You ask people in a respectful way and sometimes they say yes and sometimes they say no.

Mama

Will the private school work with you to write an IEP (or some type of plan if they don't want to call it an IEP) so all the teachers and staff who interact with your daughter are on the same page? It seems horrible that you do not know if the math teacher is aware of her challenges when you have already made such an effort to convey information to the school. Seems to me it shouldn't be that hard when they have such a low student to teacher ratio. Sorry, I don't have much specific advice but I would offer encouragement that you are not being a meddling mother. If the staff and teachers cannot convey this important information from one to another, then they are putting you in the position of doing it yourself.

What country are you in (the IEP laws vary)? Do you have any other options in the area? Other private schools, special-needs schools, or homeschooling? Is moving to another school district an option?

Since you have the funds to send her private, can you afford to send her to a neighboring public district that has a GREAT special ed program??

I am in the US. There are many private schools in our area (because our pulic schools are terrible) but the others are mainly christian schools. I have thought about selling my home and moving to a neighboring district which has a better reputation and I am not opposed to moving for this reason.

I also have the option of just moving her to another Elementary school in my district. The main problem I had with our public school was the principal. She single handedly refused any and all supports or modifications or even assessments. When I left that school I filed a federal DOE OCR case against them and she lied completely to the Federal DOE. They actually ruled against the school and that is why I have sort of "burned my bridges" with them. I know retaliation is against the law-but I wouldn't put it past this principal. I don't know if the Director of Sp Ed would help me at another campus or if they all hate me now.

I don't know if the director of our current school is open to a sort of IEP. I feel like I am bugging her any time I talk to her. I walk away from any conference with either the teacher or the director feeling like nothing was accomplished!

You never know, perhaps the Director of Sp Ed feels the same way about the principal as you do. The principal at our elementary school retired at the end of the school year last year. I had thought all the teachers loved him to pieces but once he was gone, I heard a different story, the story of how they really felt about him. The Sp Ed Director may have appeared to have solidarity with the principal at your old school but may have been acting that way because it is what was expected and may treat you very differently at a different school. Do any of the medical professionals you have contact with have any opinions about the various schools in your area? One doc we see was not shy at all about telling us which elementary schools he thought were doing a good job with special needs kids and which ones weren't.

The federal DOE attorney "hinted" to me that our district was notorious for lacking support and cases against them. The neighboring district has a better reputation and a fellow mom I know who is a teacher in the neighboring district has told me that Grace would qualify for "so much support" in her school/class.

The district we are in, when we had our IEP meeting, actually told me that my daughter's extremely high and extremely low test scores (scatter) "averaged out to normal" and that it was "not appropriate" to look at individual scores as all they were concerned with was an overall IQ score. This came straight from the Dir of Sp Ed. She also told me that an IEE wouldn't matter, they didn't have to put any more weight on the results than their assessment, despite my initial private assessment which resulted in the AS diagnosis. While the school's assessment did show areas "of concern" they stated that there was nothing that couldn't be handled in mainstream classes without an IEP. It is instersting to note that after I withdrew my daughter from that district, the Speech Path privately assessed my daughter and diagnosed her with Mixed Expressive/Receptive Language Disorder, and an Articulation Disorder, and told me that the "school threshholds for such diagnoses are much, much higher". In other words, unless my daughter is low IQ, non verbal, or extremely violent, she was not going to get the help she needed in this district until they saw some massive failure.

It is so hard for someone different from typical to get a decent education while the broke districts are using every loophole to get out of offering any assistance!

We had my DD tested with a neuropsychologist with the hopes that she could shed some light on how our daughter learns. One of things we learned was that she had a huge mis-match in working memory ability: depending on how a subject was presented to her, she could have a performance score of way above average (in the 90th percentile) or way below (18th percentile). This huge contrast is only evidenced in about 2-5% of most cases. I mention this because in third grade, working memory/executive function skills become a huge part of the learning process. It's during this academic time when kids are expected to start taking notes, listening to teacher "lectures", interacting in groups in discussion. Sometimes these need to happen all at once!

For our daughter, third grade became a major turning point. Teachers had already begun to "lose her" in second grade, but because I was a parent volunteer (helping all the kids in the class, but with an eye on mine ), some of the more complex lessons could be broken down by me. We worked with a fabulous third grade teacher and the SPED team at our local (home)school, but it just wasn't enough. I didn't feel as if my daughter was learning adequately and often she would be so anxious and tired from her six hours of holding it all together in school, she would come home exhausted and crabby. She spent much of the time buried in books in the classroom, trying to avoid learning.

I would examine the school district you mentioned that would be a better fit (not your old school). It sounds like they would be better prepared to handle your daughter's situation. I wish I could say that your local school would be worth a try, but honestly, your daughter probably could not handle the stress of changing, yet again. I would think that the next move you make would be the school you are 99.9% sure is going to give her a better education and attention she deserves. Instead of fighting battles, you could be putting your energy in making sure your DD is comfortable.

That being said, please, please check out the school very carefully before you work on the transfer. In our situation, by the middle of third grade, we had decided to move our DD to a self-contained classroom in our district (slated as an "academic-ready" behavior/communication classroom). This was not the perfect fit for her, since there were many children who were not on the autism spectrum, but had standard behavior issues. I *thought* I had checked out the class well, but it turns out I visited on a "light" day. Things flowed very nicely during my visit. I should have made a point to visit on a busy day, because that's the environment my DD would have been in most often. The transfer was a bad idea - I would pick her up and she would either be in tears from frustration, fear (from the boys in the behavior classroom), or angry and anxious. It turns out she was the only student functioning at or above her grade level. She had no homework and the work she did do consisted of "worksheets" - no actual teaching took place. I had no idea what she learned last year (3rd grade), and I was surprised that she did as well as she did on the state standardized test because she had barely any accommodations and only took the test once (kids in our district can take the state test up to 3 times!) - she wouldn't tolerate another testing session. She almost passed the math standard for our district, but half of things on the test she was never taught!

While private schools may be amenable to hearing an IEP, unless they have someone trained on staff who knows how to create one, they are probably not equipped to offer adequate support for your daughter. The one thing about the public system is that there are so many checks and balances in place between SPED and the gen ed teachers, someone (from a school psychologist to a SPED teacher) is bound to know how to help and what accommodations to put in place. There are specialists that the district can call upon and by law, they need to have an IEP meeting for you whenever *you* request. In our city we have parent advocates who help parents create language in the IEP that will give students the support they need. Most public school systems offer a very powerful set of tools to work with. Private schools do not need to be held accountable by most standards and usually are ill-equipped to handle the child who learns "outside the box".

I wish you the best in the search for what is right for your DD. After we spent a summer testing out a private school (where we were gallantly rejected because they didn't have the staff to deal with individual student issues), I decided to homeschool through our state's online charter school offering. It was a great decision and both DD and I are very happy with the results.

If you have the means - have your child evaluated by the highest qualified institution/doctor that you can feasibly access in your area - your regions 'autism experts'. Have a developmental ped perform the full evalaution and write a full report along with educational support recommendations. Use this documentation first with the school she is currently and/or with the school district if the private school does not want to work with you.

As stupid, petty and ridiculous as it seems tossing a 'big name' at educational professionals kind of takes the fight out of them. They KNOW they cannot refute, deny or challenge the opinions of someone who's reputation is considered superior in their field.

I need to constantly advocate for my daughters needs in our public school - for the most part they are good dedicated teachers - just woefully un or under educated when it comes to HFA and Asperger's. I discuss what I see at home and the strategies and methods that work best in helping my daughter learn and I get the equivilent of a pat on the head. My daughter was dx'd at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. At our periodic visits I tell our developmental ped what troubles we are having at school and my recommendations and strategies. Usually, the doctor agrees that how I'm IDing my daughters issues and working with them as the best course of action. She simply puts my ideas in her own writing with all the proper keywords the school needs to hear and I present that at an IEP meeting and changes I may have been working to make for months happen almost instantly. It shouldn't be that way. I honestly wonder if this is an NT thing because I simply do not fathom it. Why do my words go ignored yet a piece of paper with an influental logo on it says the exact same thing it is taken as gospel? Whatever the reason - that official logo gets you much more than Dr. JoeSchmo down the street and it can certainly get you much further than your word alone.

I would give it another shot with the private school, basically demand a meeting, and see what you can get done. You are paying for their services, you have purchased the right to have them pay attention to you.

If that fails, I would visit the other school district and ask them if they might accept an inter-district transfer. These are not unheard of; actually pretty common in my area for special needs kids. I would not sell a home and move in the hopes it is better, because you could go through all that and simply discover that 300 school age kids on one campus is never gong to work for your daughter no matter how great the special ed department is.

I am sorry it isn't going well. Wish I had more in my head right now ... just super tired and have a horrible work deadline coming up / will need to stay mostly offline for the next week or so.