I am happy to announce Keep It Together Man’s first guest blog! I have known this Dad/author for as long as I have known Cheerios at the breakfast table. When he told me his story, I asked him to write it up. It is a great example of the battles of parenting in the special needs world. ~Rick
The worst day of my life has repeated itself numerous times since I’ve been involved in the not so “special” education system. If special is defined as dysfunctional, devious, and mean, then yeah, it has an appropriate name.
I learned my daughter has special needs during a second-grade parent-teacher conference. The teacher showed me a plot graph of her 25 students’ performance scores. As is typical of a bell curve there were a few dots at the top of the scale and the rest were clustered toward the middle except for one dot standing all by itself, a considerable distance from the rest, at the bottom. I was informed that was my daughter.
I was stunned. My wife had taken our daughter to two years of mommy and me preschool and she’d completed kindergarten and first grade without any issues. We knew our daughter was slower to develop than her peers, but every time we’d bring up concerns to our pediatrician or school teachers, we were always told not to worry about it and that she’d eventually catch up. We even delayed starting her in kindergarten, against her preschool teacher’s recommendation, because she had a late birthday and we didn’t want her to be the youngest in her grade.
Back to the second-grade parent-teacher conference. The teacher said my daughter didn’t appear to understand what was going on in class, was unable to work independently, and would look around the room when other kids were completing their assignments. She would just sit in her seat in silence.
This had been going on for several months, plus I’m to assume, all of Kindergarten and first grade. When I broached the subject of why nobody had tested her for learning disabilities, I was told that only a parent can initiate the conversation. To be clear initiate a conversation not approve testing.
WHAT? Yes, I’m shouting. One of the biggest criticisms of public education is how many tests they make kids take but a teacher can’t talk to a parent about possible learning disabilities? That’s horse manure.
No, I hadn’t specifically asked for her to be tested for learning disabilities, but I had brought up concerns about how long it took her to do homework and her verbal communication skills. I was always told she would catch up.
How was I supposed to know what to ask for? I have an advanced college degree. My wife is a full-time high school teacher. We didn’t know what to ask for so how would anyone outside the special education system know what to ask for? The reason is they don’t want you to ask for it.
Three months after my parent-teacher conference the school district still had not completed the assessment. They would drag their feet until ultimately we moved and they transferred the case to the new district.
Why did the district deliberately avoid talking to me about assessing my daughter? Why did they drag their feet to complete the assessment? Because of money. The dysfunctional system pits children’s needs against the ambitions of administrators trying to get promotions by reducing expenses.
We know early intervention is the key to helping special needs kids reach their full potential. The anger still festers about how my now 16-year-old daughter’s life might be better if only the district didn’t trade her future for a sparkling financial report.
Signed,
Parent of San Diego County teenagers
The reason for keeping the author of this blog anonymous will be revealed in part two
To be continued…
