Unhappy letter to Julia's special ed teacher:  

Dear S,

I am sending back the math sheets that came home on Friday.  This is far beyond Julia’s ability at present and I don’t think it works to have her therapists and I coach her through each square.  She doesn’t have most of the concepts and coaching her through a new concept for a single square does not teach her anything.  She can do the math facts, although not perfectly.  She can also do the <, >, but again not perfectly.  To get her to do a sheet of mixed addition and subtraction problems, we worked most of the summer using different strategies, like color coding, to get her to recognize the difference between problems.  We spent the entire summer on addition and subtraction facts and greater and less than, even these concepts are not rock solid.  To give her a scattering of math concepts does not help her learn.   

When you sent the similar sheet last week, I thought you might have been trying to assess Julia’s skills, but I don’t think it is useful to do more.  It is simply frustrating for all of us.  Even simple word problems will take much more practice before she can do them independently.  Right now she can do: If I have 5 apples and you have 4, how many apples do we have.  But modify that a little and she is lost.  Example: I bought home a bag of apples.  I gave 5 to my family and my neighbor took 4 home.  How many apples were in the bag?  This took a long time and many pictures to explain, and she could not do another problem like this on her own right now.  

Can we get together on Monday right after school to go over your plan for Julia’s math curriculum this year?  I don’t know what you are doing with her individually and how often.  If Julia does some of her math work in a group, I would like to know what they are doing in class and what the plan is for learning concepts.  I want to support the plan in every way that I can, but at present I don’t have any idea what to do or the direction she is going.

I am having somewhat similar struggles with the writing assignments.  Giving Julia a page-long rubric for writing a poem is not helpful.  What is the goal for Julia in this exercise?  Is it learning about rhyming? Is it making sure the entire piece is about one topic?  Is it about adjectives and adverbs?  Is it about capital letters and periods?  Which of these is the focus for Julia this week?  If Julia was a typical learner, I would not be such a micro manager.  I would expect that she would pick up some part of the instructions each time she did a writing assignment and by the end of the year, she would understand most of them.  Julia is not like that at all.  We’ve all been working on the Wh- questions for reading comprehension for a long time now, and she still needs a lot of scaffolding to answer “why” and “when.” 

I am sorry if my tone is demanding but we are going into our sixth week of school and I don’t have a good idea of your plans for Julia this year.  Are the necessary assessments finished?  Where is she in terms of her IEP goals for this year and what can we do to have her meet those goals? 

All of this has been on my mind for a few weeks now.  I feel badly about laying it all out at one time and with a less than positive tone, but I am very concerned.  I hope that we can figure it all out on Monday.

All the best,

Suzanne 

________________________

I have no idea what concepts to teach or support.  Or frankly, how to teach the concepts.  I learned math quickly, Julia learns it very slowly.  I do not instinctively know what to do with her.  Today, I have the uncomfortable feeling that her teacher is trying to fit her into a low math group.  Julia’s math skills are probably far below the lowest of the math groups in her class.  If she is put into a group to work, she will find ways to manipulate the people involved to seem like she is getting the work.  This is not bad behavior.  She manipulates so she can survive and she is very good at it, but it will be the manipulation and not the math that she will concentrate on.  Is this the way that special ed kids get through school?  Very scary, indeed.  

What is scary is the degree to which I need to stay on top of Julia’s education.  This is in an excellent school with excellent teachers and a commitment to Julia, but I know that there have been general ed budget cuts that effect special ed and I know more cuts are coming.  Julia’s therapists and I put so much energy into supporting what she is learning in school, and still I need to worry and monitor and ask for correction.  This is exhausting.  I totally understand how parents can just give up and let a challenging kid skate from grade to grade learning nothing.  If the school is satisfied, I can so understand why parents just hope that their kid is learning and leave it to the experts.  

What underlies my fear is also my research into moving out of Wisconsin in a few years.  I was investigating the part of Maryland that Lisa lives in and I have been very disappointment with the schools.  I found a specialized school connected with the Kennedy Krieger Center, the John Hopkins equivalent to Waisman here, that takes in referrals from different counties in Maryland, including Hartford County where Lisa lives.  I thought this could be an answer for Julia but when I talked to someone from admissions at Kennedy Krieger, I was more than disappointed.  The process is long, daunting, and offers no guarantees.  I would have to enroll Julia in her local public school and ask for an IEP meeting.  A meeting would be convened after school started -- Julia might start school without any support in the classroom -- and the IEP team would consider implementing Julia’s Wisconsin IEP.  If they didn’t agree with it, they could ask for new evaluations, and then re-convene and come up with a plan.  There are weeks between each step of the process.  

Once there was a plan in place, Julia would need to fail.  The plan would be modified, and Julia would need to fail again.  Only then could I ask that she be placed outside of the neighborhood school and even then, the IEP team might want to place her in a different public school where the process of implementing her current IEP and/or modifying it would happen all over again.  If all else failed, they might recommend that she go to the Kennedy Krieger school, however, Kennedy Krieger has a very limited enrollment and she might be put on a waiting list there.

This scares me to death!  I would not have the therapist support that I have now.  I could not homeschool.  And unfortunately, I want a life outside of Julia’s education.  

This is a lousy way to begin a day.