I just got off the phone with the admissions director from the LD school and I need input from all of you.
First, he was not at all confident that they can meet DD's 2E needs - they will have to closely examine all her test results. Her high level comprehension/verbal ability may be outside their scope. They have to review her scores but his initial thought was that he would not be comfortable placing an 8 year old in a working group with a 12 year old. The question for them would be whether placing her with 10 year olds will be enough to meet her needs. That is problem #1.
#2 is that they emphasize Rehabilitation almost to the exclusion of Compensation. We were supposed to meet this week about adding Assistive Technology to DD's IEP but it was snowed out. (DD is still home from school - don't know if we'll get back this week at all and then next week is February break. Who knows when we'll actually meet...) From what I understand from our conversation the LD school is just starting to allow students to bring in personal iPads and laptops but they provide no support or instruction. They want the kids to learn to write - if we want DD to learn keyboarding skills we will have to work on them with her on our own. They do not believe in providing scribes or voice-to-text support. He said something about a student may determine that they learn best through audio books but then they will be responsible for tracking down the audio book themselves. This is to provide a level of independence to make it more likely that their students can succeed at the college level. I am just not sure if it's really feasible for DD's situation.
So I am looking for thoughts about this rehabilitation vs compensation idea. Frankly if DD's areas of weakness could be remediated that would be great. I don't see it happening though. Maybe a few years ago this compensation idea would have been a bad path but if technology is available that makes it possible for her to work around her challenges with less strain that trying to forge through them doesn't that make sense? I think there are worse things than having to use keyboarding or audio recording devices - right? I mean if she could improve her ability to write notes then I assume the 3 years of OT she has received would be showing some benefit and it's really not. Isn't it better for her to have someone scribe her 3 page creative writing assignment than to have her turn in 5-6 illegible words?
If this can work I want to hear the arguments for it. If it won't work I need to hear those too so I can formulate my argument for why the 2E school in NYC or some other type of program is the better option.
Thanks in advance.
