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

Is this it?

http://www.wrightslaw.com/info/2e.index.htm

The second item down is a 2010 letter from the acting director of the Office of Special Education Programs saying:

"With regard to students with specific learning disabilities (SLD), the Analysis of Comments and Changes in the regulations implementing Part B of the IDEA (71 Fed. Reg. 46540, at 46647 and 46652, August 14, 2006) contemplates that there will be some students with high cognition who need special education and related services:
Discrepancy models are not essential for identifying children with SLD who are gifted. However, the regulations clearly allow discrepancies in achievement domains, typical of children with SLD who are gifted, to be used to identify children with SLD...;

No assessment, in isolation, is suficient to indicate that a child has an SLD. Including
reading fluency in the list of areas to be considered when determining whether a child has an SLD makes it more likely that a child who is gifted and has an SLD would be
identiied.
"

and a point that is very key to our situation:

"
Moreover, it has been the Department's long-standing position that, in general, it would be appropriate for the evaluation team to consider information about outside or extra learning support provided to the child to determine whether the child's current academic achievement reflects the service augmentation, and not what the child's achievement would be without such help. "

I don't think this has anything to do with having only 1% of kids use accommodations, but rather having at most 1% of *severely* disabled kids take an *alternate* test.

I know that my state (CA) has the CST (California Star Test), which can be taken with accommodations (extended time, questions read out...), and then the CMA (California Modified Assessment -- "students whose disabilities preclude them from achieving grade-level proficiency on an assessment of the California content standards *with or without accommodations*") and the CAPA (California Alternate Performance Assessment -- "for students with severe cognitive disabilities") which test against a different curriculum.

I think the CMA and the CAPA is what is meant by the "alternate" tests above... and since the CMA means that the student's IEP is failing to bring him/her up to grade level it is understandable to limit its use. Because abusing it would be soooooooo easy (basically any student on an IEP could be left out to fail without affecting the school's grade).

It looks like your school is not playing those games, pity they are still getting hit by the penalty

[
and a point that is very key to our situation:

"
Moreover, it has been the Department's long-standing position that, in general, it would be appropriate for the evaluation team to consider information about outside or extra learning support provided to the child to determine whether the child's current academic achievement reflects the service augmentation, and not what the child's achievement would be without such help. " [/quote]

Oh, Yeah! That's the other thing we were told. That the school should consider the fact that our son was being privately tutored in determining whether he should get an IEP based on whether or not he was at grade level.
I made the argument and even showed them the passage from the law, but the principal just said, "that's not how we do it here."

I realize they weren't in compliance with the law, but we wanted to spend our money on tutoring rather than attorneys. But if tutoring hadn't worked and we needed to transfer to a private school, we would have pursued that option at that point.

I second the motion for a disability rights advocate, and

http://www.napas.org/en/ndrn-member-agencies.html

provide a link to a page where you can click on the name of your state in the list on the right to get contact information.

I've never been able to quite figure out the entire "disability rights advocate" system, myself.

I'm not quite sure what they do or how they do it.

With the parents' permission, the advocate examines the file and goes to meetings with the parent (or sometimes participates via speakerphone).

In my experience, advocates are much better at explaining the law, procedures, and EduSpeak to parents than us teacher types.

Beckee mentioned that advocates can explain the law to parents - as a parent who's advocated both for a child with a medical disability and a child with an LD, having an advocate as a resource has been extremely helpful. In our situation, we've found that it wasn't only the parents who needed help interpreting the law, but also found at times we were working both with school staff who were unaware of the law as well as not informing us of our child's rights as a student under the law (note: our kids were at a school that was actually in non-compliance with IDEA at the time, as well as in a school district that is hugely stressed with not being able to meet the needs of many of the children who qualify for services under IDEA).

The way we used our local advocates was to call them when we had a question. For our dd with a medical issue, this amounted to 2 or 3 calls, one at a time, when something came up at school where we were told something by the school staff re her rights that didn't fit with what we knew from our own research. The advocate group gave us the clear interpretation of the law, and the words to use when making a request at school.

We relied on advice from advocates quite a bit over a number of years for our 2e ds. It was primarily the same type of us calling with a question of legal interpretation plus help with how to word a request, as well as help with understanding timelines, eligibility process, where to look for local and state policy, things like that. We started our ds' journey by requesting a 504 since we felt he wouldn't qualify under IDEA and we were mainly concerned initially about getting access to accommodations. When we made the request for a 504 we were told by his then-teacher that our ds couldn't have a 504 if he was in the gifted program. This is sooooo absolutely not true, and an example (one of many we ran into) where teachers really didn't fully understand or weren't aware of the ADAA. Later on as we added accommodations and began to see the extent of the impact of our ds' LD we realized our ds needed individualized instruction as well as accommodations and at that point we were given more detailed advice and suggestions re how to proceed from our advocate. We never had to bring an advocate to a team meeting because we felt well prepared with the advice we received prior to the meeting. We *did* successfully advocate for our ds in getting an IEP for his LD even though he has an exceptionally high IQ and is/was ahead of grade level in *many* areas. NOTE: he was not ahead of grade level in the area of his disability, and was in fact quite far behind and struggling tremendously. In spite of that showing up obviously in his work, it was quite the challenge to advocate in the face of a very dedicated attempt on the part of the school to prove that there "wasn't a problem".

The IEP we did get for our ds would probably be considered "weak" by Pete Wright, and our local disability law advocate reviewed it and felt we should advocate further to strengthen it. The advocate's group offered to help us fight the school to get it "strengthened" but that was the point at which we gave up, because the fight was taking too much of our energy away from helping our ds, which is something I have found happens frequently with families who can somehow put together the resources to find help outside of school.

Back to the question about advocates, another thing our local advocates group does is host help sessions and speakers on a variety of topics that are useful for parents of children with a wide range of disabilities (ASD, LD, medical, developmental disabilities etc). These sessions don't just focus on schools, but on resources available in our community as well as serving as a way to bring families with common challenges together for support.

polarbear

This may be an approach that we will need to take down the road. We have done a lot of work to prop DD up, particularly with respect to writing. Even with the extra time provided by her 504, she was an anxious mess when it came to her state standardized writing test this year (it was her first year taking this type of writing exam). She said that she still didn't finish. It's hard to know whether my little perfectionist is being overly dramatic or whether she truly bombed it. It will be interesting to see how she did. I guess if she bombs it will help me argue to keep her 504. The school has started hinting that she doesn't need it even though it can be painful to watch her write. sigh.

I've found it useful to read the sections of Wrightslaw that deal with "functional" skills. If a child is academically superior, but there are some particular skills necessary for normal life and school function (writing seems a key one) that aren't up to par, one can make the case that remediation is appopriate.

DeeDee

knute, we've found that our state writing exam doesn't really test the type of writing that students need to be successful in school. The early-mid elementary state tests are mostly about correcting grammar and punctuation, and in our earlier elementary school tests really seemed to resemble more of a reading exam. We were shocked beyond belief after our ds scored *one point* below advanced proficiency on his first state writing test! (writing is the area most impacted by his disability). We had him take the sample version of the test at home where we could score it ourselves, and found that because he knew grammar conventions well he scored highly, in spite of his having been completely unable to produce any kind of written work on the one essay-answer question. This year he's in a private school and had to take the ERBs instead of the state testing - I haven't seen any kind of sample ERB, but from what ds has told us, the writing part of the test didn't include any kind of written essay and the only part of the test he had to do what he considers to be "writing" on was the reading portion of the test. Soooo... trying to advocate for writing help with only state testing to go on can be very tricky. If your school district uses the WJ-III Achievement tests as part of the standard eligibility suite of tests, that is also a bit tricky because they also don't test the types of skills that are used in writing anything more than a very basic sentence one at a time.

This is what we did in advocating for our ds for an IEP in SLD/written expression:

1) We requested the school team include the TOWL (Test of Written Language) as part of ds' eligibility testing. This is a VERY common test that is used all the time in our school district to evaluate written expression - but our school staff *did not* tell us that it was available or that it was a useful tool for this type of evaluation. We knew about it a) because I'd researched it and b) we knew it was available because we asked our advocate and they informed us that it is routinely used in our school district. So - we asked for it and our school said yes. But that's the way everything went with our school - they offered up no knowledge of anything, but when we knew what to ask for and asked for it, they said yes.

2) We kept copies of all of ds' written assignments from class, and we talked to him to get as much detail as we could so that we understood what he felt challenged with. We just kept these in reserve, made sure we knew which areas of writing were causing him trouble, always asked for help with those specific areas, then the school staff would always say "oh no, there isn't a problem, he's right on grade level etc" so we'd *then* pull out copies of his work, show what he had and hadn't been able to produce, and that usually stopped the counter-argument from the school that everything was "just fine" because the classwork couldn't be argued with. If they did try to argue that he was capable of more, we requested that they show us - and they never took us up on that because they knew him well enough to know that we knew what we were talking about.

3) We requested subtest scores for each of the ability and achievement tests that ds was given by the school district, as well as having the same info from the private testing ds had been through. In our area, the school will not provide subtest scores unless you specifically request them.

4) We didn't know to ask for this at the time, but I would have asked if I'd known then what I knew later - follow that? I would have asked for an SLP evaluation. DS eventually had one privately which revealed his expressive language disorder. His #s on the SLP testing aren't low enough to qualify for speech therapy through school, but they could have been used as additional data showing that he had a challenge in expressing his thoughts.

5) We knew (thanks to our advocate) that the school would come to the eligibility meeting with the eligibility draft form already filled out (everything except the "team" decision) and that they would come to the meeting with their own agenda. We knew they would argue that our ds didn't qualify based on a standard formula used by the school district that was based on the ability and achievement standard tests and didn't call in any other evidence (even though the additional testing we'd requested would be reported on the form). We knew that the school would also argue that ds' state testing scores would not be considered "low" and that if he had grades they would be considered "average to high" hence he would be pegged as working at "grade level". We also knew, thanks to our advocate, that the eligibility decision was a team decision and had to take all the data we had into account - so we went into the meeting, sat and listened, asked questions where pertinent, and made sure we pointed out that although the broad averaged categories on ability/achievement testing looked a-ok, that if you looked at the subtest scores there was one huge hole falling below the district cut-off and that area in turn related to a skill which impacted ds' ability to produce written work.
We also specifically requested that ds' performance on the TOWL (and also the PAL, another test of written expression that he was given when he wasn't able to produce enough words on the TOWL to be scored - imagine that!).... be used in considering eligibility. We basically just sat there patiently, listened to the school try to build a case for how well our ds was doing (and I'm pretty sure it was leading up to all the reasons they felt he didn't qualify for an IEP)... and then politely but firmly redirect them to the evidence showing that he did indeed have a significant challenge with written expression. It was a long meeting! But ultimately they couldn't make the data we had disappear and the team agreed.

So that's how we got the IEP - to be honest, it bothers me A TON to think of the kids who might be out there struggling and don't have parents with the resources or motivation to spend the time we had to spend researching and thinking through how to get to that point. I know too well how demoralized our ds was at that point in his school career, and worry so that other children in the same place, without a parental safety net to keep them afloat, might never be able to pull back out and get on the track to success in school. It's so very very frustrating! I hope that once I'm not spending most of my time simply trying to help my own kids grow into their own skins at school that I'll be able to help other families and children who are faced with similar challenges. Not sure how... but that's what I hope to be able to do, in some way.

polarbear