Reality check: how much should parents organize homework?

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Reality check: what should a parent's role be in helping their SPED student's executive functioning deficits be where homework is concerned?

I just had a long conversation with the SPED department and my son's caseworker: he has been missing approximately 3 assignments per week, and has not been getting his long-term assignments "chunked" because he hasn't been reporting those assignments to his caseworker.

His caseworker essentially told me (and she's absolutely right) that she doesn't have the resources to check the school's computerized system for 10 students and follow up on all their assignments, and implied that we are supposed to be doing that at home. She said she prompts all the students to check each day.

My response was that I agree that she is right; that can't be done in a class of 10, but that my son can't be the only one who needs something more than a prompt to do his homework, he needs some kind of accountability system. In the end we agreed to an afterschool check and an email to all his teachers, but her general response was that the law (in our state) is 10 SPED kids to a classroom, and the department isn't going to add resources.

I don't want to take resources away from other kids, but I also don't think it should be my role as a parent to check every class daily and then check all of my son's work to make sure it is done (this is where I'd like a reality check.) I recognize how much time this takes because we've been doing it somewhat unsuccessfully, but if we have to do this at home, so do all the parents who don't have the resources to do it.

I would guess that a large proportion of SPED kids have poor grades due to this specific problem - I know I've talked to several other parents about this issue. According to the school's "report card," SPED kids are only meeting grade-level expectations about 30% of the time - I can't imagine why they think it's acceptable to have the minimum required staff and just allow kids to fail.

I do understand that at some point, I have to roll with the system: I'm just wondering if you think it's acceptable to ask a parent to follow up on every class a student has every day to make sure they do or don't have homework, rather than just making sure the student has the supplies, time, and requirement of doing homework at home.

I think that it would be smarter if there was a system in place where each teacher had a time of day when they sent assignments to the caseworker for how many kids they have in SPED. Just from a quality control perspective, it makes sense to me that this would be more efficient and less time consuming for the teacher than fielding irregular inquiries from parents.

I don't know if the school portals have a teacher side, but basically there should be some sort of stored database query in there where the teacher can pull up (very easily) the records of all his/her students who are SPED and who need assignments sent to a caseworker. The records can be pulled up and sorted by order of class period/grade or by the name of the caseworker for each affected child. Then the teacher can send whatever needs to be sent to each caseworker for the relevant children.

If the system was set up in that kind of sensible way, I cannot imagine it would be more annoying than dealing with parents emails, calls etc.

How old is your son again?

I think it is completely reasonable to expect a parent to check and make sure their child's assignments are done each day. It is your responsibility in my opinion, not the school's. You should implement the accountability system yourself. All these are your roles as a parent, in my opinion. I know NT kids and teens whose parents make sure their work is done each day.

My son is a freshman in high school. He did not get an IEP until 5th grade, and got no support for executive functioning

To be clear: we do expect that our role is to ask if my son has homework, and to make sure that he does it.

The school is expecting us to go to each teacher's website each day, find if there is homework for that day in each class and confirm that my son knows about it and that it is done. The teacher's websites are not consistent, nor are their systems for putting in homework, if they even put it on the website at all.

I think it's reasonable to go to the teacher's website and check about the homework, or if you can't get the info there, ask the teacher what assignments are due each week. It would be reasonable to make a schedule of all assignments each week and gradually train your son to handle more of these himself. I was reading another thread on wp about parents helping their college age son with this type of thing.

I tend to agree that it is a reasonable expectation that parents do this at this age. Freshman year is a huge transition, and many NT parents are still extremely involved in executive function support and homework management support. Some use it as part of teaching accountability, responsibility, helping the maturation process, as bbtnyr stated. The way the original post was written, it seems like the question is who has to do the legwork to check the assignments. Since the ultimate goal is to teach the child how to do it, and hold him accountable for doing so, and since homework is done largely, well, at home, it feels like a parental job to me. If he were older and at a functioning level where it was clearer that executive functioning skills of this nature were completely out of grasp, and the only goal was getting the material in his head, then I would think the school would do it. But, in my mind, that would only be their job if it was clear that he would always need an aide in life, and therefore teaching executive functioning skills would be lower priority.

Sorry if I misunderstood, but you have a child who appears to have enough skills that teaching him at home using more traditional methods doesn't seem like it's yet an impossible task. If this is about the PITA that it is to check the homework schedule, well in reality it's his job to check, and is probably a huge PITA to him too, which could be one of the reasons why he's not doing it. But being a PITA doesn't automatically make it the school's responsibility.

The material that is on the website, she can check; but if there are teachers who either don't use it, or worse are inconsistent , she won't know if everything is on there or not. This means that effectively she is going to have to email those teachers with daily reminders to send her the homework or send emails confirming everything was posted on the site, which is likely to be insulting/annoying to the teachers.

I could be wrong b/c we never made it this far through public school to deal with more than one teacher, but is that not the point of having a caseworker as a liason? This way the teachers will have to confirm it with the caseworker and won't have to be annoyed with who knows how many daily inquiries from various parents?

(I still think a database would be really nice)

Everything I said was theoretical, since my boys are 4.5 - lol! I could well be entirely off base.

I am sure you aren't, and that is the expectation. It just seems so inefficient.

I hate to tell you, my DD school requires all parents to do that via their kids' iPad tablet. She is 11. If she can't or won't, we have to do it.

They use an app, which makes it slightly easier, but the easiest is just getting a text when the teacher updates her class page.

The school also has an online official grade book which we are supposed to check.

It takes 20 mins each night to be her personal assistant. One friend's family has 4 kids, all under the age of 10. That mom does around an hour of check each night.

My DD has an ASD friend in the same grade. She thought, much like you, sped should help her daughter out with this.

BWAHAHAH! ( cliff note version of email )

And the part of the pdf file (high lighted), if your kid can't or won't check for assignments or missing grades, it's all on you mom and dad.

Basically, nothing wrong with your hands, pull it up yourself. District requires all parents to do it if the kid won't. Your kid has the IEP, not you, which in more polite words is what they told that mom.

I hear you. It blows chunks. If the checking is required for all parents (it's written in the district school hand book), you maybe SOL.

My kid got a C+ due to 5 missing assignments. Teacher told me and my DD tough noogies. Start checking the page.

This is exactly what we are running in to, except teachers don't always respond to emails. What needs to happen is that my son needs to be taught some form of recording his assignments at the end of each class, and there needs to be some system of accountability in school (he has a class he's required to attend called "learning strategies" with his caseworker) to ensure he is learning to keep track of them accurately.

I have no problem checking a list of work and making sure that it's done when he gets home - but having us parents track down 8 teacher websites every night with 8 different methods of giving information and a wide range of accuracy is not helping my son learn these skills - and, yes, my son failing due to missed assignments is apparently our problem. It's different from elementary and middle school in that each class is an island unto itself (we had the Ipad thing in middle school, but the teachers in each grade worked together at least.)

We will figure this out one way or the other - but what about parents with multiple kids, no access to the internet, who aren't home when the kids get home, etc? It seems to me to be a simple way to pull grades up.

So, it seems to me that the biggest frustration is with the inconsistent method in which teachers post homework; if it were consistent and easily accessible, it seems like you'd be willing to pinch hit for your son. That's administrative, not developmental. And, although it's frustrating, inefficient, and nonsensical, it still doesn't present to me as an ASD specific hardship. Now, if the homework responsible parent also had executive functioning issues, or was the average red-blooded American who resents ineffeciency, I could see why this would be particularly frustrating. But being frustrated by an inefficient/mind-boggling system isn't enough of a reason to say that the school should do it. Instead, it's a reason to join the PTA and fundraise so that the system gets better (the database that ASDMommy proposed).

And BTW - teaching your child how to check each class seems to be a school function to me. But, picking up the slack when he doesn't do it feels parental. And I would like to point out that in our current society, our children's failures seem to be a reflection of our own, NT or not. That is not fair or accurate - our kids can thrive independently, but it's often hard to see that, NT or not. But getting our kids to independently thrive, special needs withstanding, takes a suspension of ego, and a willingness to get in the trenches to teach them, working as hard as we can to get them to rely upon others (strangers) as little as possible.

If he's meant to ever be a good student, he'll have to organize it himself sooner or later.

This is what I'm talking about. I wouldn't mind picking up the slack if there was any effort made in this direction, as is specified in his IEP.