[quote=polarbear]First question - how did you find this out? Did a school staff person tell you, your ds, someone else? I'm just curious about the situation that caused it to come to light./quote]
First, I was talking to the Director of the GATE program. She brought up the district oral reading assessments as evidence that DS's reading wasn't at a high enough level for the program (this is a 2nd grader who reads middle school books and has a VCI in the 99%). She was completely unaware that he had an IEP.
I then got his school test records and talked to DS. The reason he has an accommodation is because, according to the the assessment's manual and scoring guide, oral reading fluency assessments are not valid for children with speech fluency disorders (stuttering, apraxia etc.). This is because you cannot distinguish reading disfluencies from speech disfluencies and also because the disorders can slow the rate of oral reading. Therefore, what you end up measuring is the child's speech ability rather than the child's reading level. There are no alternate assessments or tests in his school record. There is also no record or notation of any accommodation. When I talked to DS, he said he had to read out loud and was given the tests the same as everyone else.
I agree, in hindsight, that the accommodation should have been written clearer (I wasn't the one who wrote it). It's probably a bit contradictory - participate in assessment with accommodations but then the accommodation is to use an alternate assessment (which wasn't done).
Last edited by dreamsbig; 05/11/16 10:47 AM.
