504 meeting today. The path is begun. I can't actually tell if it went well or not - opinions welcomed.
DH and I brought the educational tester (T) to 'explain the results' and be forceful for us where needed. I opened by saying we saw problems, but didn't really know exactly what they were or how to solve them, and so we had her tested, and T can communicate the results more clearly than we can. She explained the findings in the testing. The school psychologist seemed pretty familiar and happy with what had been done but pointed out that it would be a mistake to count the trouble spots as below average; fluency and processing speed are lower than her sky-high reasoning score but not really a problem in themselves. T pointed out that as soon as any academic task required applying processing speed, the score dropped precipitously. They finally accepted that this was true (but I'm not sure if they just wanted to move on).
Accommodations:
extra time for testing, in a separate room, no problem.
reduction of assignments such as doing only odd math problems or two paragraphs instead of three, got pushback: this is something that has to be negotiated with individual teachers and makes no sense to do here and now for next year, and besides it isn't always possible. Eventually wrangled an agreement to have a standard assignment reduction in place unless the teacher specifies that it doesn't apply to that assignment. They wanted DD to be responsible for asking the teacher what the reduction would be for every assignment individually.
elimination of paragraph-style writing assignments in math class got extreme pushback. We asked for bullet points on any assignment outside of English class that required more than a one-sentence response. They wanted to not modify writing requirements at all until at least 8-10 weeks into the next school year, when we could 'see how it goes and the teachers get to know DD'. We eventually got what we wanted for now, and an agreement to meet again at 4 weeks into the term to tweak the plan.
Clear communication of due dates and ahead-of-time topic warnings for in-class writing assignments: they have a set of teachers in mind that uses the online assignment system particularly well and will try to put her with that group. There aren't any in-class writing tasks where she wouldn't know in advance what the topic was in 7th grade. (Sounds dubious to me.)
They offered an adaptive technology ...review? referral? which they will take care of themselves. It was nice to have something offered without having to ask.
We had it pointed out to us that a kid who can get As and Bs doesn't need accommodations, no matter how much effort it takes to get them. I used my test example above - gets 80% because she knows all the multiple choice but can't write a single word for the free response section - and was accused of wanting them to give her A++ on everything. 80% is fine, right? What are we complaining about?
It is very odd to me that an educational institution is more moved by her having had to give up afterschool drama to put in the extreme effort she does than they were by the total time of the effort (2-4 hours a day, on one project, every day including weekends) or by the fact that she consistently writes zero words in-class.
In hindsight, this looks pretty grim. Do you all agree?
