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

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

Thank you for your thoughtful replies. I've got some work to do.

Our district tried to operate like this when DS was in K, but we came at them with more and more resources until they changed their tune and granted him appropriate services. I see it as a form of gatekeeping; but persistent and well-funded (sigh) parents here do find their way through the gate, and once you're through, the services are good.

IMO it "stinks from the head down"; if the district's person in charge of special ed is hostile or a bean-counter, or the school board is apathetic, they are more likely to make things awful for families.

Around here (this site) I see lots of people going the extra mile for their kids; in the long run that also changes the school for the next kid, sometimes...

DeeDee