No Need for Another Evaluation
Really?
That title is misleading. Because when the School Psychologist called me to tell me that he'd been through our son's file and thought that we could move forward with the IEP without evaluation, I was relieved. No need for him to be pulled from class repeatedly, Yay!
The summer after 5th grade had me rethinking the Academic Achievement Center. They felt like they had hit a wall and instead of actually implementing the program, they were spending a good portion of their time reading a novel...it seemed ridiculous to spend $50 an hour to read a novel together. So, when the summer was over I pulled him out of AAC because I felt like I was wasting time and money.
As sixth grade started I wondered if things had changed at all or if we would learn more about him if we did another evaluation. I knew a lot more at this point. I had a much better understanding of what he needed, but I didn't have a good understanding of his strengths.
The CTL Clinic had branched out into Dyslexia Assessment right about this same time and one of my dear friends, who was one of the grad students at the Clinic, was administering the diagnostic assessment. So, I signed my son up for that.
Sidebar for the death of the Dyslexia Assessment Clinic. It turns out that it made NO sense to separate dyslexia assessments from other assessments at HEDCO. So, you can now get a dyslexia assessment in the HEDCO Diagnostic Assessment Clinic - or whatever it's called.
So, what did we learn at the beginning of 6th grade from our external evaluation (that's just an evaluation that happens outside the school)? Here's a rundown of the particulars that I found relevant:
Writing Skills
Written Language - 1st percentile
Written Expression - 14th percentile
Reading Skills
Total Reading - 4th percentile
Basic Skills - 8th percentile
Reading Comprehension - 13th percentile
Listening Comprehension - 96th percentile
Sidebar: As a reminder, using the 1st percentile as an example: If you score in the 1st percentile, that means that 99% of students in your age range on that particular test scored better than you. Or, that if there were 100 people who all took this test, you would have gotten the lowest score.
𝅘𝅥𝅯𝅘𝅥𝅰 One of these things is not like the other 𝆕𝅘𝅥𝅮
So, if you aren't sure about the difference between listening and reading comprehension, it's probably exactly what you think. Listening Comprehension is listening to someone else read something, or say something and being able to tell back what was said or read. Reading Comprehension is reading something yourself and then being able to answer questions about what you read. Our son's listening comprehension is off the charts. And his written language (basically spelling) is in the 1st percentile. Yet, I still can't get teachers to understand that taking notes doesn't work for him. He has to be able to listen to what's being said. If you make him write at the same time, all of his concentration changes focus to the writing. He can not do both things at the same time.
Also a fun fact: When you can't spell and writing is a laborious task for you, you will use the fewest number of words with the least amount of letters to answer any kind of question. So, even though he has a very extensive vocabulary and frequently uses it while speaking, he almost never expresses himself that way in writing.
I've sort of gone off on a tangent here and the truth is...none of this mattered. I provided a copy of the assessment to the school and I don't even know if it's part of my son's permanent record. I was mildly excited to hear that he would be receiving instruction in READ 180, which had some evidence of students making gains (but unfortunately, it is really for students in tier 1 or tier 2, not SPED)
UPDATE: MetaAnalysis of READ180 See Nate's tweet below
Back to regularly scheduled programming here: it turns out that, as with any program, it is only as good as the fidelity with which it is implemented. And it was not implemented with fidelity. Also, there is a spelling part that my son struggled with horribly. He really had trouble completing that portion until he discovered some kind of workaround - which he was praised for. "Good job, man! You worked the system so you didn't have to really do the thing you were supposed to do!" I wasn't exactly thrilled with this. And based on descriptions of his READ 180 class, there was a lot of game playing, chatting, making things up...very little actual work being done. I think it was about halfway through the year when I found a former Clinic tutor who was interested in getting paid to spend an hour with the boy. She got a crash course in Phonics for Reading from my friend who had done the dyslexia evaluation, and she spent 2 days a week after school working on a pieced-together program with him. And, because there was an obnoxious brother at home, she went straight to the school and worked with him before he came home.
So, just to recap, that's 3rd through 6th grade where my husband and I have had to supplement our oldest son's education because the school wasn't teaching him to read. Does that make us part of the problem? Maybe. I mean, the schools will never get any better if we just keep filling in all of their gaps and they continue to take all the credit. But, who wants their kid to be the guinea pig for that? Obviously, I didn't.