This is an interesting case and I would love to hear from anyone who has ever experienced this before: My son, who has dyslexia, did not qualify for spec ed services in our district. There wasn’t a big enough discrepancy between his performance and his potential. However, when he continued to struggle in school, I had him tested out of pocket (DO NOT DO THIS, MAKE THE SCHOOL PAY FOR AN OUTSIDE EVALUATION) by an outside consultant. The school still refused to qualify him even though they agreed he was behing. He is a “between the cracks” kid. This year when he started school, I took the teacher a couple of books that I thought would be helpful in educating my son. They had to do with multisensory strategies. Much to my surprise, these people who had been fighting me for services for the last 3 years began using these materials! My son is still not qualified for special ed, but he IS making progress. He also goes to the resource room every day to work with the ECSE teacher. Interesting considering his is not qualified for services, don’t you think? I keep wondering how much the other children in the regular classroom would benefit from the approaches they are using to teach my son if they were doing them inclusively. Although I am certainly glad to see some progress, I think it’s a sad commentary on where we are with IDEA to see LD kids, Dyslexic kids, “Between the Crack” kids go unserved because our teachers don’t recognize that with a little innovation and a little creativity they could succeed instead of falling far enough behind they DO qualify for services.
I agree with you that it is a shame that your son does not qualify. The frustration for many Learning Support Teachers is that we see many students who are struggling and would benefit from extra 1:1 instruction and support.
In the system where I work we have very strict guidelines and indicators which the students must meet before they qualify for help. The applications are submitted to a panel which reveiws submissions from many schools and decisions are made about who receives funding. Your school may operate under a different system.
As teachers we can only keep trying our best to offer support and help these students as best we can. It gets back to the funding being put into school sby the government and the allocation of resources within the school.
cheers
helen