Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional wrightslaw seminar -- the one that surprised me

FYI, I attended a Wrightslaw seminar yesterday. After hearing in many contexts that dyslexia was not recognized under IDEA, I was surprised to learn that dyslexia is included explicitly in the list of specific learning disabilities and has been since the 1970s. The definition of "dyslexia" is somewhat vague since it is based on 1970s terminology. The book includes a footnote stating dyslexia is "a language learning disability in reading, writing, spelling, and/or math. From a legal perspective, dyslexia is a learning disability that adversely affects education performance." He does not give a citation for this interpretation.

http://idea.ed.gov/explore/view/p/%2Croot%2Cregs%2C300%2CA%2C300%252E8%2Cc%2C10%2C

" Specific learning disability.
(i) General. Specific learning disability means a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, that may manifest itself in the imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or to do mathematical calculations, including conditions such as perceptual disabilities, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia."

Yes, that's true, but the school doesn't have to do anything about dyslexia unless it significantly impairs the ability to learn. That's why most gifted kids can't get an IEP for dyslexia-- at least, that's what has happened with my son, and what I understand happens repeatedly in our school district. In fact our district says they don't recognize the term dyslexia even though it is in IDEA.

The school willingly gave him a 504, however, whose main accommodation is that he is allowed to type his assignments (if the teacher remembers, which she rarely does). We had to do private tutoring for three years as remediation because he wasn't behind enough for the school to do anything special.

The good news in our case is that the scaffolding from the 504 has worked, along with our expensive tutoring, and I do think he's going to do great as he gets older.

Dyslexia is so frustrating to deal with.

Our school actually moved my oldest son's IEP from his LD category to OHI. They said he longer qualified for his dyslexia because of how good he was doing, but his type 1 diabetes qualified him under other health impairment. They did keep his accommodations for dyslexia, but it was no longer the qualifying issue. The school here is really trying to keep supports for the kids as long as possible and they found a way to do so with him. If he didn't have a serious medical condition, he would have lost the IEP sometime late elementary to early middle school.

Our school actually had its ranking knocked down last year because they had 6 kids more than allowed to have accommodations during testing. It's ridiculous system that the are penalized for helping kids with special needs.

We were told by advocates that since my son is designated as Highly gifted, he should be compared to his highly gifted peers in determining whether his dyslexia significantly impairs his ability. Somewhere on Wrightslaw, there's an article explaining how to make the argument.

Well, we tried and the school thought we were nuts. It's actually really easy for us to do a comparison to highly gifted peers, as my son has a twin who's dramatically ahead in reading. The last time we had a meeting trying to get remediation was at the beginning of 3rd (he's ending 4th now) and my dyslexic son was barely proficient in reading, and we had a private tutor. The school's position was that my son was at grade level, so there was no problem and even gifted kids have a range. (Just as a little brag-- he's now 1.5 grade levels ahead in reading thanks to his hard work and an awesome tutor.)

It's not that IDEA does not include dyslexia, or that there are special rules to keep kids from dyslexia out of special education. Dyslexia is a medical diagnosis. There's usually nobody in the school district qualified to diagnose it, and the label itself tells educators nothing that they can use that cannot be tested some other way.

As I recall, there is a question that has to be asked in the eligibility meetings for all the eligibility categories. "Does the child need specially designed instruction in order to benefit from a free and appropriate public education (FAPE)?" If the answer to that question is no, the student does not need special education and does not qualify for it.

I guess I'm just frustrated that I have heard that the school doesn't recognize dyslexia or that the state prefers a disorder of written expression diagnosis. They don't even present it as an option. It's in the federal law yet they have dismissed it. At the same time I recognize that we aren't in any position to fight it. I know that my DD would never qualify for an IEP at this point. She is working at grade level because we weren't willing to wait until she failed to get help. I don't know whether Congress realized the consequences of their actions when they eliminated the "discrepancy clause." It seems to have burned a lot of 2e kids. They had several special ed directors at the conference who noted that in our state the "magic" percentile number for arguing that it has impaired the child academically is the 12th percentile (bright line, no exceptions). Pete Wright started asking them how they handled borderline cases, i.e. 13th percentile, when I had to leave.

I looked back at a letter our district sent out and this a federal thing.

"Students with severe learning disabilities are eligible to take an alternate test instead of the traditional state-mandated standardized tests. The U.S. Department of Education allows only 1 percent of “alternate” tests taken by students with severe learning disabilities to count toward that district’s annual report card."

"Now, when the number of students with learning disabilities who take an alternative test exceeds the federal limit – last school year, the district had 16 students in this category and they are allowed 10 – the remaining six scores count as failing on the district’s report card"

The worse part of this for my district is we had our highest scoring year ever! We got downgraded last year from “Excellent with Distinction” to “Excellent.”

I understand not wanting schools to take advantage of accommodations, but this has gone to a silly level. I live in a district that takes in kids from other districts with disabilities and we get punished for helping the special needs kids. We have at least 50 kids from other districts with only around 1600 for k-12 total number of students. Our district has a good reputation for having strong serves for the disabled. I know a lot of families move her just for that reason. The total number of disable kids in our district is pretty high.

Maybe this is why so many districts seem to be trying to avoid IEP & 504 plans. I know my oldest was allowed an audio version of the test years ago. I'm not sure what defines "alternative test" by federal law. I don't believe extended time is part of this number.

Beckee's correct - dyslexia is a term that's used by the medical profession, but the school district uses other terms to describe challenges. Our ds is dysgraphic and dyspraxic; when I want to research, those are the terms I use that are most helpful in finding information. His diagnoses from his neuropsychologist are "disorder of written expression" and "developmental coordination disorder" - essentially the same things as dysgraphia and dyspraxia, but her profession's terminology. The school district recognizes my ds' challenge with written expression as "Specific Learning Disorder - Written Expression".


The school district doesn't diagnosis in the way a medical professional does, *but* the early elementary educators I've known do recognize signs of struggling readers and are somewhat able to pick apart different potential challenges. Our school district does a lot of work with supporting children who are learning to read in the early grades because reading as a skill is so very critical to future educational success. Our district also does dyslexia screening using the same tests that I've seen used privately.


Everything I understand about IEPs matches what Beckee wrote here, but fwiw, our schools do, when they want to qualify a child, use OHI to qualify for the IEP and then add services which are really targeting other challenges such as reading, writing, organization.

The wrightslaw website does have a copy of a letter written interpreting the updated IDEA guidelines in the case of children who are in gifted programs which can be helpful when advocating for a 2e child - I'm sorry I don't have the link at the moment, but if I recall, it's pretty easy to find if you look through the list of topics on the left side of the homepage - I think it's under "twice-exceptional".

polarbear

knute, I share your frustration! I wonder if you've consulted an advocate? Consulting briefly with an advocate made all the difference for me when I was advocating for my ds' IEP - both in help with understanding our state and district policies and interpretation of IDEA, help in giving me support in understanding how to frame my requests/responses/etc, help in knowing how to make a game plan based on what might happen and what arguments would most likely be tossed back at us by the school, and perhaps most helpful, insight into our specific school and the staff's history of dealing with SPED/IEPs etc.

Our state also has the 12th percentile as the "magic line" below which all must fall There are a bunch of other criteria too - a few of which can be real gotchas. In our district that 12th percentile is supposed to be on a "broad" achievement test - the type where several subtests are averaged together - to qualify as SLD. For OT/SLP services there are additional requirements that have to be met aside from standard OT/SLP tests. The flip side of it all though is that eligibility is a team decision - the school can't just say that a student doesn't qualify for services because they didn't fall below the 12th percentile on a specific test. There is room to argue that the preponderance of evidence indicates the child qualifies under SLD by taking all the testing etc into account.

polarbear