Please help! 2 kids, different difficulties, same school

It sounds like the IEP is not being adhered to, and the school has to follow it under law. You can seek another meeting of the MDT team, but I would be more likely to call the regional office if your district has one, or the superintendent’s office. In other words, if the school is not cooperating, you need to proceed, politely but firmly, up the chain of command. Also, if the school fails to adequately educate your daughters (which appears to be the case), now may be the time to start looking into having your daughters put into private schools, and having the school system pay for it. I would talk to an attorney who specializes in and is experienced in special education. The Disability Law Center has a website. Start doing some research on how to work the system in your state (I believe you said it was Missouri). You can also consider transferring them to another public school, but there may be institutional resistance. Good luck!

I agree - talk to an attorney! The special ed teacher sounds like a disaster, and you will be doing more than your own child a favor if you can bring some attention to the fact that he is rigid and ineffective and doesn’t even know what your child’s IEP says. Of course, you would say it more diplomatically…

I don’t know if you know this, but you can do speech therapy at home. If you can get someone to give you a little coaching, the exercises are not that hard to do, and they will eventually ask you to do it anyway to support what they do at the clinic. I would do some research, see if you can find someone to give you a consultation, and pick some short-term goals. Since she hears well, there should be no reason why she couldn’t just work on one sound at a time and practice speaking more clearly. You may have to get everyone in your family to participate, having everyone use extreme over-enunciation, and also refusing to assist her in any way unless she is willing to make an effort to make herself clear. So far, she has gotten by with poor articulation to get her needs met, but you can gradually raise the standards of expectation for her in a way that she can achieve, and gradually teach her to speak more clearly. If you can get her to participate in agreeing on what to work on, you will be even better off.

So find a specialist, by all means, but understand that the bulk of the work can and should be conducted at home, and even if you can’t get all the services that would be optimum, you don’t have to wait to start working on these issues. Find a way to create a plan and get everyone in your family on board with it, and see what happens. It’s not likely you will make it worse. The only way to go is up!

Thank you. I see I need to do a LOT of research. This is a very small district in Missouri. The superintendant and principal and LEA are all the same person. There is no supervisor of special Education.

The only one higher up is the president of the board who personally hired both the principal etc and the Special Ed. teacher. (Who also is one of the bus drivers and the minister at the President of the board’s church.

Like I said, small rural area of Missouri

I almost forgot- regarding the speech- she tries very hard. She repeats herself many times and tries to get the words out. Sometimes it is as if the front part of the word has been “chopped off”. I can’t really describe it.

We have been trying to help her at home, and will research more to try more. We just don’t really know what we are doing.

The doctor said the hearing test was a “basic screen” which she passed. There is some scarring in her ears, but “it probably doesn’t interfere”. My daughter has had many ear infections.

I am a speech pathologist….You CAN help her at home by bombarding her with nursery rhymes and songs that have the sounds that she is having problems with. You can also help her by showing her how to say the sound. She is fronting her /k and /g/ sounds. In order words every time she wants to say a /k/ or /g/ she puts her tongue behind her front teeth and makes a /d/ or /t/ instead. So the trick is to try and get her to make the /k/ or /g/ in the back where the back of the tongue just touches the roof of her mouth when either the /k/ or /g/ is made.

You can also check out these websites and do these articulation games with her..

http://www.quia.com/pages/havemorefun.html

Also read lots of books with her that have /k/ and /g/ sounds in them. The /v/ and /th/ sounds are sounds that will come a llittle bit later but for now do what you can at home until you can get her into a speech therapist. She is atleast getting seen once a week by the school speech therapist ask her for homework to work at home with.. But do what you can to improve her auditory memory and articulation at home.

You are stuck between a rock and a hard place…with your son…I don’t think you are going to get very far with a lawsuit either, a…you probably don’t have the funds to start one…you won’t find an attorney where you live who specializes in special ed law…and they really don’t have the funds to provide the program they need and my question is…is this teacher really qualified to teach special ed kids? What is his teaching credential in?

I would start a *serious* paper trail on this guy. He’s new? He should be former, IMHO, if he can’t learn that kids really are often very easily hurt.

So I would send a letter of gentle concern that includes as much totally objective information as you can (that, in his words he has “gotten on her” and perhaps is trying to motivate her to work harder, but that in fact his comments such as “would never have a good job or life” were frightening and discouraging to her.)

If you send it now, while it’s still not a *really* big deal, you won’t be really, really wishing you had when he doesn’t stop and things have gotten worse.

I meant to say…your older daughter…for some reason I thought you had a boy and a girl…Sorry…however, Sue is right…you need to make sure this guy isn’t doing something abusive to scare her…

Thank you all!

My daughter with the speech difficulties is now receiving therapy at school, 1/2 hour a week..and therapy with a private speech pathologist. We are working with her at home too. The therapist WE pay for gives homework. The one at school does not. At least she is getting help though. We are reading the stories and the other things you suggested at home too.

Things seem to be going from bad to “worse” with my other daughter though. First I want to add, I posted this in the wrong spot, she is specific learning disability, not ADHD. I was so stressed i did not notice my mistake.

The teacher for special ed. is on a “provisional contract” he does not have certification yet but is working on it. (or as the principal told me, he “is learning”). He has a Masters degree in Theology and behavioral science.

He is a minister, and retired military. He is 55 years old. For the past 4 years he has been an “APEP” assistant at a junior high. He said these kids all had “behavior disorders” and this is his specialty.

Well, we called a meeting and remained calm-amazingly-. The IEP ended up being changed. At the meeting we had agreed to try something different for a week, but anyway-the new IEP just arrived in the mail yesterday. It states that my daughter will remain in class for her 600 minutes specified in the IEP, but she will receive help there.

For two weeks now the Spec. Ed teacher has been coming up and “helping” in the classroom. The Gen. Ed teacher and the assistant also help. My daughter gets her assistance from the Gen. Ed or the assistant. The Spec. Ed teacher says this is called the “team approach” to education.

My daughter says she receives no lessons or instruction on anything other than general Ed. (her own words are “I still don’t get any help learning to read better”) They read her text to her. Her IEP said she was to get her text taped…but at least now she is getting SOME help in there…..

Anyway, he also sent a progress report-from Gen. Ed.! still no word on the progress/benchmarks stipulated in her IEP.

I really don’t know what to do anymore. I did sign up fro the Wright’s law seminar in Oklahoma City December 2 and 3 though.

Good job getting the IEP changed! Now the next challenge is to define “help.” You have to be central to advocating for the kind of help she needs. Figure out what is most effective and make sure that is what is happening. Again, these folks don’t seem like the brightest bunch of professionals and they will need more than encouragement to do the right thing. I would find whichever one seems most rational and talk about specific interventions. Just having someone sit there and coach her through her assignments isn’t enough. She needs some specific modifications in the curriculum as well as how the information is presented. I don’t know what those modifications would look like, but she is entitled to them. It’s their job to do whatever is necessary to educate her, and just having more people hanging around will not make her learn better.

It sounds like you have made a little progress. Don’t give up!

I appreciate all the support.

I felt bad about the results of the IEP-but the bright side is, my daughter isn’t afraid to go to school anymore.

So far the “help” she is given appears to be reading her text to her if she asks them to, and having things explained to her “if she asks”. She brings home TONS of work now-regular homework, plus all the in-class work she couldn’t finish.

She is getting no instruction on improving her reading skills. Her IEP stated that her annual goal was a 4.5 reading and comprehension level 4 out of 5 times with 90% accuracy.

She didn’t do any of these in the Special Ed. room, her General Ed. class has an “accelerated reader” program. Every child has independent reading time and takes a quiz on their stories. The report from the General ed. teacher shows these results:
40% on 5.0 reading level
60% on 4.9
20% on 5.7
60% on 1.8
80% on 4.8
100% on 3.4
0% on 4.1
60% on 2.7
80% on 4.4-Charlotte’s web
70% on 4.9-Sign of the Beaver
90% on 4.6-Sarny-A life remembered

Those last 3 are books that are also specials on television, and I know she has seen at least two of them before. The other book is one that was also required reading for some of her friends (and was also available on tape in the Special Ed. room-so I am unsure of the validity of those 3 scores)

She is reading Alice in wonderland here at home. I notice that when she reads aloud to me, she halts after each word. She does get them though.

I just wish I knew what I was doing. I really don’t know what she needs, or how to help. I don’t know if the school will ever cooperate? I don’t have any teaching credentials. I am going to receive my Associates in Business in December. So I don’t have a clue as to what is “correct” for her.

I don’t have time now to give you the whole outline. My suspicion when a kid reads very haltingly and unevenly is memorization and weak decoding skills; this is the most common pattern. Weak decoding causes slowness, hesitation, bizarre misreadings, poor comprehension on truly independent work, and uneven comprehension scores depending on how much repetition and memorization has been done. I have posted several very long outlines previously and to avoid repeating myself I now send them out by email. If you want these outlines, now a book in progress, showing how you or a tutor can help her outside of school, email me at
[email protected]

I agree with Victoria. I also find that a child with this pattern has probably been required to read aloud before she was a fluent silent reader, and has a lot of anxiety about getting the words pronounced correctly. I worked with a kid like this one time who had had a lot of speech therapy, and she seemed to get reading aloud mixed up with speech therapy (i.e. the goal is to produce the correct sounds rather than understand the story). I had to work with her reading aloud and then fill in the words she didn’t know for a while until her anxiety went down. She also dramatically overused phonics on every word, so that things like “through” were incomprehensible to her. I had to teach her that some words are exceptions to the rules and you just had to remember those words and not sound them out. She got a lot better after I helped her distinguish words where the rules didn’t apply.

I have also seen kids who can perfectly pronounce every word even when they have no clue what the word means. So reading aloud doesn’t tell you everything.

Every kid is different, and sometimes you just have to try out different things and find one that works. She seems to be understanding the words but lacking in fluency. I would be interested if she can read silently and understand the content, so as to distinguish between inability to understand and inability to read aloud, which are different skills.

Don’t worry about not being a professional! You are a professional when it comes to your daughter. You may not have all the answers, but apparently the professionals don’t either. Try some things out and look for even small successes to build on. She certainly doesn’t sound at all like she is unable to read, so if you keep at it, you will find a way to make it easier and more fun for her. If she is reading Alice in Wonderland, it is likely that she can read reasonably well and will continue to become a better reader as time goes by. Be patient and observe what works, and you will get there eventually!

Yea, what he said :-)

When she halts, how is she “getting” the words? Is she having to pause because she’s nervous, because she has to take all that time to figure out the word (which generally but not always means the phonics skills aren’t good enough, not that they’re ‘over used’ - if you’re spending all your energy remembering the next dance step, it’s not because we spent *too* much time getting the steps right, it’s that it’s not smooth yet), or is she trying to figure out a good guess? (One way to tell is by the words she gets wrong - what mistakes does she make? Or if she ‘gets it’ eventually, what does she do along the way?)

Couple things I’ve learned the hard way: Whenever possible, don’t let her reading skills slow down learning. Don’t make her try to ‘practice’ those reading skills when she is also trying to learn history or science or understand that story. Get it on tape, read it to her, whatever. (A much poorer choice is to have her practicing the **bad** habits and frustration by letting her wade through it on her own… but sometimes that’s necessary.) Comprehension is *much* lower when all your energy is spent on figuring out the words. (This doesn’t mean to stop caring what the words are, though!)

OH, and BTW - they *do* set up the AR tests so that you have to at least have read the book to get some of the questions. The movie may have helped her a lot, but my librarian friend’s extensive AR experience is that if they’ve *only* watched the movie, they fail the AR test (and she knows which questions separate movie/TV from book; when new movies come out, they change the tests ;))

I forgot to add one thing - she may also be trying to pronounce words she doesn’t actually know the meaning of. Always check to see if the word is new to her, and if it is, explain the meaning or look it up in a dictionary. It’s very difficult to pronounce words that you’ve never heard of, and it’s an awful habit for kids to get into, sounding out words they don’t understand and moving on. Or sometimes, they know the word, but the letters don’t make the right sounds phonetically, and they don’t recognize what word it is, and you need to clue them in. There is no benefit to reading without comprehension.

As for “overusing” phonics, I mean applying phonics to words where phonics doesn’t apply. “Through” has a “g” and and “h” but neither of them are voiced. If you think that every letter has a sound in every word, you are going to get into a lot of trouble with words like “through” or “doubt” or “rhythm” that have silent letters or letters that make unexpected sounds (like the “o” in “women”). There are patterns you can teach kids, but they have to get over the idea that “g” makes a “g” sound in every single case.

What Steve is describing can be considered the second and third levels of phonics. Reading Reflex refers to the “advanced code”.

One problem is that people use words to mean totally different things, sometimes with deliberate intent to mislead, other times out of ignorance (which is almost as bad in somebody who is supposed to be a teacher.) When people say a child “knows phonics” or wahtever, that far too oftne translates to knowing Book 1 chapter 1 only, the simple single consonants in the beginning position. There is a LOT more to phonics (properly done.)

You have to make sure that your child progresses past this beginning stage and learns enough to make phonics useful, then practices until it becomes automaitc.

I have to disagree somewhat with Steve here. In the *beginning* stages, yes words need to be learned auditorially. However, when you pass the boundary of genuinely reading independently, around Grade 3 level, you enter a whole different world. English has the largest vocabulary of any language on Earth, and many of those words are not frequently used in speech. In order to develop a good vocabulary, a student *must* learn words from books. It takes training and skill to learn to get meanings from context and to pronounce words by advanced phonics with a little help from a dictionary, but this is where we hope to go.

I agree that kids need to learn words from reading. I am simply pointing out that it is necessary for you to supply the meanings of words they don’t understand, rather than teaching them to pronounce words that have no meaning and mistaking that for “reading.” Reading is about understanding the intent of the author, not about pronouncing things correctly. I knew the meaning of the term “epitome” for years before understanding how to pronounce it. I called it “ep-i-tohm” rather than “e-pit-o-me,” but I knew what it meant.

Phonics should be a tool that kids can use to help figure out what word is intended by the author. If the word is unknown, no amount of phonics will tell them what it means. You absolutely have to have kids learn the meanings of the words they are reading, otherwise reading becomes a meaningless activity of making noises until the teacher lets you sit down. I have seen the bad results of this kind of instruction and want to stress that many reading problems that kids have come from exactly this kind of misunderstanding about reading. I think this is why informal volunteer reading programs are so effective - they make reading fun and interesting and more about understanding the story than about learning some skill you will be tested on later. Reading exists as a form of communication. If you don’t understand every word, you don’t understand the story, and reading becomes a chore.