02 Sep 2010, 10:58 am
The school's reluctance is indicative of a general mindset of "wait and see" which can be quite detrimental to our kids and they can lose precious time while the school drags their heels. Your son is still quite young but I would urge you to get him into a better placement before too much time is lost "playing their games". Any seasoned educator with an ounce of insight should be able to tell you exactly where your child is struggling, how he/she is different from the peers, where their strengths are, etc. It is apparent that many schools are dealing with so many behavior problems and complete illiteracy that they don't want to be bothered by an extremely bright kid who might have some splinter deficits. Just a warning from a mother who has BTDT, don't allow him to fall between the cracks and don't believe anyone who says "he's fine" if you feel intuitively that he is struggling. Ask for DATA not just one test score to substantiate his progress.
I lost a year of my daughter's critical development waiting for public school to address her refusal to read while they would report she was miraculously passing the benchmarks. After a year of feeling something was just not quite matching up between what I saw at home and what they were reporting to me and work assignments coming home incomplete because they said "she just wasn't applying herslf", I withdrew her. She is very new in the new school but already, working with the director who has a daughter with issues herself, she has ben able to discover some processing problems that SHOULD have been addressed a year ago! I am kicking myself for listening to the public school for so long!
