I'm glad you heard back from the AT evaluator Pemberley - frustrating as it all is, looking in from the outside, I see a *lot* of progress here... but I know it's really tough to see it from the inside trenches.
There's a lot to reply to in your update and the following posts, so I'm going to take it piecemeal... which means I might not get to everything right away, but here goes!
While I am grateful to have this eval and to have an evaluator who gets it I am once again struck by just how tough this is going to be. I really need to hear some BTDT stories with happy endings. Kids who were so far behind the 8 ball in the early grades but who hit their stride with the help of AT. Please. I really need to hear some of these.
As DeeDee and MON have mentioned, there is so much more than just AT, and this is a journey. BUT since you asked for happy endings with AT, I'll share our AT experience because I do believe that although it's just one piece of the puzzle, and we're nowhere near any "end" of anything, AT has made an enormously positive difference in my ds' life. For all the work in the world he's put into learning how to write and I've put into advocating, he would *not* be able to write today and would never have learned how to write (I'm referring to written expression here, not dysgraphia) IF he had no AT available to accommodate for his dysgraphia.
Note: I'll quote our school district's AT rep here.. sorta.. keep in mind that AT isn't limited to high-tech computer solutions, but can include low tech accommodations such as scribing or a slanted noteboard or whatever. In our ds' case, I still scribe for him occasionally at home.
Back to the high-tech type AT: the tools that ds has used have changed over the years (alphasmart - laptop - iPad) as well as the types of software (first he learned to type, then he added word prediction, then he later stopped using word prediction and moved more to voice-to-text etc). But it's much easier now that he's in middle school and has several years of AT under his belt to look back at where he was and realize that the AT he has used has made a HUGE difference in opening up his ability to access his education.
polarbear, part 1
ps - as an example of how far behind in the early grades ds was in written expression.. here are a few examples:
K-1 - no way to tell because he tore all of his papers apart, crumpled them up, threw them across the room and then stomped out of the room screaming when he had homework. On a good day. On a not-so-good day he stared at the paper and said he didn't know what to do for 30 minutes first, before he tore up the paper etc. Honestly, it was so much better when he just started out with the tearing up of the paper so we could move on quicker than when he sunk 30 minutes of staring into the homework first. I don't think he finished many, if any, homework assignments in K-1... and this was easy math etc - things we *knew* he should be able to easily do.
2nd grade - he didn't produce *any* written work at all until his teacher sat down next to him, and I suspect, bullied it out of him the week before his first parent/teacher conference. The rest of the year went downhill from there.
4th grade - the school gave him the TOWL (Test of Written Language) as part of his IEP eligibility review. The test includes a picture which the student is supposed to look at and then write a story about. DS was given the test twice, and was not able to write down the minimum required amount of words to have the test *scored* (I don't know how many he got down, the test requires 20, I suspect he had zero)... the school psych had never seen a kid with such a challenge before and was convinced he was just not cooperating, so he gave him an alternative test aimed at testing the same written expression skills that was able to be scored... and ds was significantly behind his age-level and grade-level peers.
5th grade - DS continued to be way way waaaaay behind and unable to generate written expression, even with AT. As an example of where he was relative to his peers in 5th grade - his class had writing workshop everyday. There were a large number of different genres of writing, most kids were producing 5 sentence 2-5 paragraph pieces of work consistently. DS was not producing any written work independently except for one very specific type of assignment. It was a repeated assignment - every Monday morning the students had to, first thing, write a one-paragraph summary of what they did over the weekend. The paragraph had to have 2-3 sentences minimum. DS was able to write that paragraph... because... he spent every waking hour of his weekend focused on making sure he did one thing to have that one thing to put in is Monday morning message. He wrote the same intro every time: "I had a good weekend." Then he wrote a sentence like "I went to see Up"... or whatever. You know, I'm sitting here starting to cry right now remembering how much work it took one 10 year old kid to produce that one paragraph and knowing how badly he wanted to be able to do well in school and also how badly he just wished he never had to go to school.
That same kid still struggles with written expression... but this past weekend he wrote a 2-page myth an a 4-page mystery. It wasn't easy, but WOW he's come a long long looooong way from where he was just last year, and two years ago (5th grade) and so many years ago when he was 6 and stomping off to his room with his crumpled up homework papers flung everywhere.
More importantly, he's happy - REALLY happy! He loves school now (not writing, he's never going to love that) but he loves his friends, he likes his teachers, he's learning cool things in math, science, social studies. He's subject accelerated in math, he's in a school that is purposely academically challenging across the board, he's got teachers who push him to do more, he's in school with other gifted kids. He after schools through CTY and loves it. He's not just happy, he's soaring.
My life is much better now too - I still have to advocate, but not as much as early on. I still have disagreements with teachers, but I know my ds even better now than I did then, I know more about his disabilities and I also know a lot more about AT. Most importantly, I've grown in advocating, hopefully I'm better at it, and I've also seen that all that heartache and hard work did get us somewhere. Somewhwere good!
polarbear, part 2
