Thanks DeHe ... Thanks to everyone. I wrote an email this morning and told them that we are not comfortable with the plan of the OT adding a session of weekly OT to occur during math class. I said in most part:
"The conventional wisdom is to completely separate handwriting from substance for children with dysgraphia. The nature of dysgraphia is that the act of handwriting fills up the working memory without room for substantive learning. I am concerned the handwriting/OT instruction during math class will interfere with his math instruction. And I do not think it is appropriate to, in any way, displace his math work with remedial handwriting and OT. In fact, Mrs.[1st grade teacher] tried this last year by making him re-write all his reversed numbers when he finished his math work early in math class instead of giving him more challenging math work. As a result, DS began to hate math class going so far as refusing to go to school. It was a pretty poor trade off and, obviously, did not do anything for his reversals.
At some point remediation needs to give way to accommodation. DS really is not making much progress with remediation (there is no cure for dysgraphia so this is not surprising); I think we, as his IEP team, should focus our efforts on exploring more ways to minimize handwriting with technology. There are lots of great programs and apps to do that, even for math. We can brainstorm about this at the upcoming IEP meeting. However, we do not want DS getting an additional session of OT during any of his classes. During his classes, he should get his accommodations and subject instruction, not occupational therapy. Thanks and we are looking forward to meeting with you all again on [date]."
Thank you all. While I was writing it, I realized they basically tried to do this last year... It is a bit weird how they keep trying to sneak in remedial writing in lieu of class instruction. I wonder if the general school of thought is that "well since he is so bright/so ahead he should spend class time working on his disability rather than actually learning more..." I guess it really is the lack of an understanding of learning disabilities - particularly dysgraphia.
