Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional "She doesn't need to be good at EVERYTHING"

blackcat, I'm so sorry you're facing it, and also can empathize so much as we have faced so many of the same roadblocks advocating for our dsypraxic/dysgraphic ds. In fact, I am sitting at my desk this morning re-reading a book on dyspraxia looking for info to share with teachers.

My ds also couldn't get enough words down on the TOWL to be scored when it was given to him the first time (he was in 4th grade). This was something the school couldn't just write off as "he's ok". I am not sure what advice might help to respond to the school in your situation, but what worked for us was understanding the tests that our ds had been given so that we understood why he scored high on some of them and lower on others, and just continually - over and over and over again - explaining what the test results meant. For us, that non-score on the TOWL made all the difference in the world. DS had "advanced" scores on all of his state-testing except for writing, and on that test he was one point away from scoring "advanced". The reason he scored so high on the state testing was the nature of the test - the majority of it was multiple choice questions about spelling and grammar, which he can easily answer when he's not in the midst of trying to actually produce written expression. Same for WJ-III achievement tests - he had some subtest scores that were very high, but when grouped based on ds' challenges you could see clearly where the challenges were impacting subtest scores. I made a chart from the WJ-III showing how the grouping of subtests showed the disability, and collected all the work samples I could both from school and home and had those in reserve to show at our team meetings. Although the types of data I collected at home couldn't be considered "scientific" or done under controlled circumstances, they made a point, and I knew that if the school tried to say they didn't believe them I could always respond with "that's ok, you run the same test/etc" because I knew they would get the same results.

We were successful in getting an IEP for our ds in elementary school, but as you've probably read here, just having the IEP didn't make it any less difficult at school - teachers and school staff still didn't believe ds really needed help, and there was a lot of trying to "blame" his difficulties with writing on ADHD (which he doesn't have, but even if he did, he still needed *appropriate instruction* in writing), laziness, inattentiveness, checked out student, whiny parents. The best thing we ever did for ds was find a private school where the teaching staff listened to and respected what we had to say as parents, and took at face value what was said in a professional report. That didn't get ds the *extra* help he needed (we still had to send him through years of SLP therapy for written expression), but it did at least give us an environment where blame wasn't being thrown around and teachers weren't trying to accuse us (parents) as over-inflating our ds' intelligence.


In situations like this, I reply with a really nice, polite email summarizing the situation/discussion, restating what the teacher said that includes documentation from someone/somewhere/somebook/somepaper/whatever, a brief paragraph, a one-pager at most, that explains the impact of ds' disability on the specific skill that the teacher is thinking will just improve on it's own. I try to make the tone of the email entirely non-confrontational or lecturing, but with the tone of just trying to help the teacher understand. The teacher may not understand it or care, but if he/she *does* read it it does sometimes help to understand. Even if they don't read it and/or don't care, you have one more piece of documentation showing how the impact of the disability is being misunderstood in the classroom.

Best wishes,

polarbear