Hi I have a 10 yr old who will be starting 5th grade and has had problems since he was 3 we are awaiting the results of capd testing but he was dismissed from his Iep in march of this year his IQ is 86 so he does not have any learning disabilities but struggles daily if he does have capd what can the school do to help him and how do I approach them with this we will get results next week and school starts week after that. any help would be appriciated
Re: 10 yr old with problems
Who did the IQ test on son? My son was in a similar situation, the school psychologist said that he had a low IQ and did not have a learning disability. However, his school did provide Resource support because he had speech and motor issues.
My gut feeling was that the school psychologist was wrong, and I had a private neuropsychological evaluation from a local university. Fortunately, my insurance paid for it. My son was identified as having a learning disability and ADD.
But between the time of the school psychologist’s report and the neuropsychological report, my son was identified as having CAPD. Now I learn that if a child is suspected of having ADD, they don’t usually test for CAPD because that can skew the testing. So I don’t really know if he has CAPD.
We have done a lot of home intervention, in addition to the school intervention. And after 2 1/2 years he is beginning to work at his grade level(fifth grade), something he has never done before.
My best advice is to provide remediation at home or through private providers. You will likely have a tough time convincing the school that they should do anything. They will tell you that your son is working at the level of his IQ.
CAPD itself is not considered a learning disability, at least in the schools with which I am familiar. The most I have seen schools provide is accommodations such as having the child sit in the front of the room (to help keep attention focused on the teacher). With severe cases they will sometimes provide a listening system — sorry, I can’t recall the technical name at the moment. In this case the teacher uses a microphone and either the student wears headphones or the whole classroom is outfitted so that all the students get the clear sound without headphones.
If you can afford it, I would encourage you to look into PACE (http://www.processingskills.com ) or LearningRx (http://www.learningrx.com ). These are cognitive skills training programs that can raise IQ scores by 20 points. It is a program of graduated exercises that work on a wide variety of skills helpful to academics — such as ability to sustain attention, ability to process visual information accurately and with speed, auditory processing (segmenting, blending, phoneme manipulation — very important for reading), working memory, etc. Because these are provider-based programs they are expensive, running about $2,000 to $6,000 depending on where you live.
If PACE and BrainSkills are too expensive, consider doing a cognitive skills training program at home. Audiblox is a good one (http://www.audiblox2000.com ), as is BrainSkills (http://www.brainskills.com ). Audiblox is about $300 and BrainSkills is about $500. The only thing with these programs is that you *must* be committed to spending the one-on-one time daily that the exercises require. Typically you need to spend an hour a day five days a week for a minimum of 12 weeks to see results. Many families are unable to make this kind of commitment of time and energy, but it’s very worthwhile if you can stick with it. These programs are very much like exercise programs for physical fitness in that you have to “work out” daily and keep at it in order to eventually reap the gains.