assements make me nervous

The good part of this is if there is a problem, you have caught it early and also you have fought this fight before and so can't be side tracted by their stupid regulations. Some of the most famous people in the whorld have been dyslexics. Blessings

Well at least you are getting assessments and help for your kids. When my oldest was little I thought he might have ADHD. I got him into a preschool program, and the preschool teacher had a son who had LD, and she told me she saw a lot of her son in my son, so she tested him for LD. He came back borderline, and got speech services to help with comprehension and stuff like that. Then we went to a different school district for kindergarten. The kindergarten teacher was helpful with my son. He liked to disrupt class by jittering and wandering around the room and such.. he just couldn't help it. So the teacher put rubberbands around his chair so his feet could play with them, and she gave him a stress squeezy ball. But the district wouldn't help me. I had a meeting with his teacher, school phsychologist, principal, and all these other people. I brought the paper work from preschool that said he'd been tested and was borderline. Unfortunately the paper also said that the speech services were supposed to bring him up to par by kindergarten. Unfortunately they took that to mean that he was fine.. but he wasn't. In first and second grade my son got awful teachers. I'd get phone calls home everyday about him wandering the classroom. I told them about the ideas the kindergarten teacher had, hoping to help them and him. Well one teacher had the bright idea of giving him walking chips. He could use them each time he got out of his seat, but once he used them up he would not be able to leave his seat for anything.. not to go to bathroom or get a drink or hand in work! If he got up without using a walking chip he'd lose playtime. Yeah.. like that's a great way to punish a hyper kid, right? So again I had a big meeting with everyone in the district, and they told me his academics weren't suffering enough to warrant getting him tested for anything. The problem was he could get great grades when he applied himself, but most of the time he chose not to apply himself.. whether because he was incabable of focusing or because he just didn't want to, I didn't know. I did everything I could at home but it got too frustrating. So we switched school districts again.. twice actually.. we didn't stay in one home for very long but that school district and the area drove me crazy. So then at the end of 3rd grade we moved out to the district we're in now. Before I even said a word this district signed my son up for AIS in math and English.. which is like an extra help course because his grades aren't great. However, I continued to fight the district on getting him tested for something. I was told my numerous people that by law if I asked my son to be tested for LD, they had to test him. So I told his 4th or 5th grade teacher that I wanted him tested and he said he'd work on it.. but he was never tested. Then I ended up having a conversation with the AIS teacher who told me about the kids they test.. how after 15 weeks of trying to teach them one topic, and they still don't understand it.. those are the only kids who qualify for LD. So you literally have to be retarded in order to get any help.. by law. So, now the boy is in high school, and basically I've given up. He hasn't changed, he is still jittery, he still wanders around classrooms, I still get a lot of phone calls about his behavior, and he still lets his grades dip into the failing zone before he'll start applying himself to bring them back up again. I've done everything I could for him, and the school hasn't been able to help much aside from his AIS classes. Basically, the No Child Left Behind Act has ensured that my son will pass each grade, but he doesn't completely understand the work and his grades usually suck! I'm glad he's such a great athlete. Hopefully sports will get him into a decent college.. and hopefully he'll be able to get himself a career in sports someday! That would be best case scenario!

Isn't dyslexia one kind of learning disability? My brother had it before they knew what it was and he just thought he was stupid because he couldn't learn to read. They didn't have a name and a treatment for it until he was in middle school. Mom and I had both tried to tutor him (and she was an English teacher), but it only made him more frustrated. Mom had hired a private psychologist to both diagnose and treat it, so he didn't have to go into special eduation classes. As we know, dyslexic children can be very bright, so we hate to see them get the special education label for any reason. Now they have special reading resource labs in some schools where the dyslexia can be dealt with outside of special education. Our son, who was then still in foster care, was about to flunk kindergarten even after I told the teacher, whom I saw twice a week as volunteer in her classroom, to let me know if he didn't seem ready for school yet. He had just moved in with me two weeks before school started and was adjusting to that, and he also was adjusting to living with hsi sister again. I thought maybe he should wait a year before going to school, and it wasn't required by law for another year, and he was also small for his age. He was very bright and very observant. That teacher said nothing to me about his school difficulties until I got the notice that he might need to repeat kindergarten. I hit the ceiling, because she could have said something earlier. When I said I'd take him back home for the rest of the year, she didn't like that either and suggested he be tested for special education. We were very much against it, but allowed the testing. His scores were very high, but they still thought he should be in special ed because he seemed to have a problem concentrating. They finally convinced us, and, as it turned out, for him it was a very good temporary solution because all he really needed was a small class size and lots of individual attention. He did so well they wanted him to go back to regular classes the next year, but we wanted him to stay because we knew he had a 50/50 chance to have a teacher in first grade at his regular school who would destroy him. We fought it through contacts in high places and our son stayed in special ed all the next year. Then we were able to move both children into private schools. Try to carefully think through what is best for your daughter as you make these decisions. Having a daughter in special ed classes, especially if she's the only girl, can have its own set of problems, as we found with our daughter. When we got her, she was nine and couldn't read. She had always been in special ed and they just kept her there when she transferred to our school district. She was beautiful and the boys in her class were already trouble makers and sexually harrassing her when she was a fourth grader and the school couldn't seem to control that. That's why we needed to get her out of that environment. Sarah was also very bright, but was carrying the emotional baggage of having been molested by her birth father. Her therapist, who was the head of the district's special services, including special ed, as her day job, said Sarah would start to leap ahead in learning if she could just get rid of her emotional baggage that her mind was concentrating on instead of her studies.