Our experience. . . (conclusion 8)

The school system had failed my son.  He had all the opportunities to push him ahead.  When he was young we read together book after book.  Rainbow Fish was his favorite.  “A long way out in the deep blue sea there lived a fish.”  I remember that opening line as if I read the book yesterday. 

To no avail life went in a different direction and reading became a struggle.  The reading programs at school did not help.  Early intervention did not work.  Tutors added little to the goal, but was a cost that I could not afford.

Math also started out ahead of the pack, but soon wavered and was stuck for four years on learning addition and subtraction facts.  Special Ed passed him off as unteachable,  to be bullied by a teacher for two years.

The IEP process was a ruse and was more of a means of classification and funding.  None of these steps had my son’s best interest in mind.  He was just another student that they were forced to deal with.  They were passing him from grade to grade withe no lucrative future in mind. In the end it was not their problem.

Little did I know that my son was the rainbow fish. “Not just an ordinary fish….”

All of this led me to the decision to do homeschooling.   Like any parent, I cared about my son. I also knew that I could do a better job than the school. I knew that if I had been teaching him he would not be stuck on addition and subtraction in math. I had graduated from highschool with high grades, never missing the high honor roll. I went on to college to get a degree in English literature studies followed by a Master’s degree. I was a huge success in my career in Technology. I felt I was fully qualified to teach my son.

The decision was simple once I had looked at the whole picture. Homeschooling was the route we would go. The burden was not on my son’s shoulders alone. We would do it together. I knew their would be challenges but nothing that we could not overcome. I knew that together we could build a future for my son.

Homeschooling has been a real success for us.  I can tailor the courses to my son’s needs and to his learning styles.  The internet is a wealth of information and has been a great resource for our homeschooling.  The good news is my son’s math is moving forward.  We have addition and subtraction facts behind us.  No more timed test which used to trigger bouts of tics.  There is no doubt he knows his math facts.  In fact, I discovered he knew his math facts so well that he is able to tell me how much change we should be getting back when we are buying something.  We moved on to multiplication which has went really well.  We are almost all the way through the multiplication tables and have started introducing division. 

Taking my son out of public school was the best decision for us.  He is moving forward in his education with no complicating factors such as hours and hours of debilitating tics.  In our case, I was the driver of response to intervention.  If I hadn’t done it, I am not sure what would happen to my son.  Most likely he would have been deluged with frustration, resentment, and failure, which would have led him to a very troubled life in his adulthood.

I admit that homeschooling does come with its challenges and requires discipline to be successful.  We have been able to do homeschooling even though I work full-time.  Originally when I worked out of the home, we had a strict schedule that we stuck to.  My son was assigned some work that he would do during the day, and then in the evenings we would review that work and do additional course assisgnments.  We took advantage of using a computer and the internet.  Google documents have been a real blessing for us.  It organized our work and has kept my son on task.  For us homeschooling has been very rewarding.

Our experience . . . (continued 7)

As I mentioned in my previous post, 6th grade for my son went fairly well.   My son had adapted to the Middle School really well.  He also enjoyed his special education teacher.  There were a few red flags including the focus of his IEP meetings was about accommodations for state testing, there was a discouragement to participate in parent teacher conferences, and a debate about the number of excused absences.

Finally 7th grade rolled around and the year did not start off the greatest.  My son was having extreme tic episodes that would go on for hours.  We had been in and out of emergency several times, with no real help except sedation.  Of course these events resulted in absences from school.  At this point the school was requiring a doctor’s excuse for the absences.  This was a bit ridiculous because we did not run to the doctor every time my son had episodes of tics.  If so, we would be at the doctor’s office every day.  This requirement was really becoming a burden on myself and my family.  It was requiring us to go to unnecessary doctor appointments  which in turn resulted in additional medical expenses, more missed days of school, and missed work for me.  The situation was frustrating. 

At one point I showed the school nurse and my son’s Special Education teacher a video of the tic events which were happening.  They understood the seriousness of the situation.  I explained to them that we had to figure out a way to keep the education process going.  Their suggestion was to get more help from the medical community, which in turn meant more doctor appointments.  My son was already seeing a very good neurologist and a neuropsychologist.  I was really desperate for help and started to go along with the recommendation that involved, as the nurse described, a community approach to my son’s circumstance.  They were suggesting involving  government agencies, the school and social workers into the process.  Once again, there was an expectation that the solution was to change my son.  I tried to point out to them that my son’s medical condition was not going to change, at least not in the near future.  Instead we needed to identify a way to accommodate him.

Here is where the enlightenment happened to me.  I was expecting them to think outside of the box in regard to accommodating my son.  For instance, we could have tutoring, or other methods of getting the materials to my son, other than via classroom attendance.  We needed to fit his education around his availability.  I could not predict when he was going to have these bad tic events.  Also, if he was in school, there is no way he was learning anything or was engaged during these tic events.  It was really teaching him a bad lesson in life — such as going through the motions is enough. 

Since the team was not capable of thinking outside of the box, especially with no major bureaucracy involved,  I realized that the only reason I was going along with the school’s recommendations was to get them off my back about my son’s absences.  It had nothing to do with my son’s well-being.  We already had the best doctors in the field.  It had nothing to do with his education.  It had more to do with bureaucracy such as attendance policies.  I also realized I didn’t need government agencies imploding into our lives and adding additional stresses on the situation. 

I then began re-evaluating the education that my son was receiving.  For the last several years I had concluded that they were not pushing my son enough in school.  He was capable of doing so much more.  While evaluating the situation it occurred to me that the schools were not even meeting the educational goals in my son’s IEP.  A goal is supposed to be able to be achieved in a school year or less time.  In the last four years, I think my son had only achieved two of his IEP goals.  The remainder of the goals just kept rolling over from year to year, or worse, and just disappeared.  I realized they were making no progress.  As an example, my son was studying addition and subtraction facts for the last four years.  He had made no progress in math since third grade, which was the year he started having tics and the year they moved him into special education classes.  I just didn’t understand how no progress had been made in four years.  On top of it all, this is a boy who had figured out addition on his own before he started kindergarten.  Math was supposed to be one of his strengths. 

It was these events that brought me to the conclusion that my son was not being educated in this school system.  He was not making any progress.  He wasn’t being given the same opportunities as other children.  I asked myself who is going to pay the price for my son’s lack of education.  The school?  No.  Instead it would be my son.  I was concerned that if he didn’t get a basic education what was going to happen to him when he became an adult.  To be honest I was totally stressed out about this situation.  I knew my son was just being passed from grade to grade with no tangible goal in mind, other than how to move him through the school system with the least effort and at the least cost.  I knew then that I needed to intervene.  I berated myself that I hadn’t intervene sooner.  Once again I thought our educational system had my son’s best interest in mind and that they were the experts to creating a successful educational environment for my son.  Well, I was wrong.

It was at that moment I decided that I had to take matters into my own hands.  I had to make sure my son had a future.

Continued . . .

Our Experience . . . (continued 6)

As I indicated in my previous posts, my son’s learning experiences in elementary school had lots of room for improvement, and in some cases did more harm than good.  It was our hope that sixth grade would be a better experience which would result in some actual education.  My son no longer had to deal with a social working turned teacher who, from his perspective, bullied and tortured him about his Tourette Syndrome.

A few days before the first day of school my son became really sick.  Throwing up.  Thirsty.  Drinking mass amounts of liquids.  It got to the point I couldn’t stop the throwing up.  I assumed he had a really bad flu.  He needed medical help, so I took him to the emergency room at the local hospital.  Initially the doctor thought it was a flu or a virus and they put him on an IV to pump in fluids and an antibiotic.  They knew my son had epilepsy and was on the drug depakote.  They took blood to evaluate whether his blood levels were okay as it relates to this drug, and then also do some basic testing.

The doctor came back and indicated that they had found something unexpected.  One of the tests they took was an A1C which is a test that measures the glucose levels in a person’s blood.  My son had diabetes.  I was absolutely shocked.  My son already had so many things going on with his health.  It never occurred to me that he would have one more challenge to face.  Looking back there were many different signs.  He had lost lots of weight in a three-month period.  At that point the doctor said we needed to transfer my son to Children’s Hospital.  They would have better experts there to help my son.

My son was in the hospital for several days.  It took awhile for them to get all of levels closer to normal.  When a person has diabetes, particularly type 1 diabetes, and their glucose levels our out of control, the body goes through many chemical changes.  The sodium and calcium levels become off.  My son’s body could not deal with the glucose, so his body was basically eating away at itself.  While at the hospital we went through a lot of education classes.  What type 1 diabetes is, how to manage it, and how to deal with day-to-day life.

As a result of this, my son missed a week and a half of the first days of school.  When he returned to school on his first day of sixth grade there was one big surprise.  In his special education class he was sitting near a girl who was his best friend since kindergarten, but had been separated for a few years when she moved to a new elementary school.  He was so happy.  Sixth grade seemed to be going well.  My son enjoyed his Special Education teacher.  She seemed to understand what was going on with him.  She had arranged for a quiet place for him adjacent to the classroom where he could go if his tics became really severe.  Physical Education initially caused some anxiety which increased his tics.  She slowly helped him get over his stress and he was able to participate.  His other classes were pretty much uneventful.  It was a surprise to me how well he transitioned to this new school.  In addition, he was able to manage his diabetes pretty well at school.

The first hint that I had that something wasn’t quite right was when we had our first IEP meeting.  Most of the IEP goals were directed at accommodations that were needed for state testing.  The only other discussion was in regard to how to handle my son’s medical issues.  There were also some goals for reading, language, and math.  The meeting was very rushed and, like the previous school, was held before school started which now I realize was a tactic to limit the length of the meeting because teachers had to leave to attend to their classes.

The other odd thing that happened was when it came to Parents Teachers Conference.  His teacher said there was no need setting up a conference since we had just met on his IEP.  I responded ok, but later thought to myself she was not the only teacher my son had.  He had classes outside of Special Education, but in this conversation they were ignored.  Today, I regret agreeing because became the beginning of the end of this school for my son.

As school entered its last trimester, the school started to complain about my son’s absences.  Keep in mind he had missed eight days at the beginning of the year due to his hospitalization and onset of diabetes.  In addition when my son’s tics got really bad, especially at night when they went on for several hours with no relief, he would also miss some school.  Add to that his doctor appointments and days missed for general illnesses such as the flu.  I was a little irritated by their attitude, especially when his teacher said she had no problem catching up my son when he missed a day.

Little did I know that this was the beginning of the end and would bring us to some major decisions about my son’s education.

To be continued . . .

Our Experience . . . (continued 5)

Fifth grade for my son was uneventful.  He loved his mainstream teacher.  For his special ed. classes (reading, language and math) he was stuck with the social worker serving as the special education teacher.  Serving is probably not an accurate description of her activity.  She was a thorn in my son’s and my side.  She did not understand Tourette Syndrome or Non-Epileptic Seizures.  My son had no privacy when these events went on, which could go on as short as a minute or as a long as forty minutes.  She expected him to continue working while his body was having these spasms of  tics and loud, yelling vocalizations.  She kept telling him he was fine, and to him, he did not feel fine. 

Something to note, since my son was put in Special Education I saw no evidence of school work.  No completed assignments, no home work (which was specified in his IEP), no comments in his assignment book, no nothing.  The only way I knew what was going on was by what my son would tell me.  In our teacher conference that happened once a year, they would flash a couple of papers in front of my face and tell me everything is going fine.  In those days I was not smart enough to ask for a definition of fine.  I made an assumption that they were doing what was best for my son.  They were supposed to be the experts. Big mistake that was.

What I did know is she was still teaching him math facts using the timed tests, which in turn created more episodes of tics and/or non-epileptic seizures.  I had given up trying to make the school stop.  Each day my son would come home and tell me how this teacher was treating him.  She was consistently punishing him for having these tics.  He was left out of any reward systems which was available for the rest of her students.  I kept telling my son to please hang in there.  This was the last year he would be in this school because he would be moving on to Middle School.  At that time he would not have to ever see this teacher again.

Toward the end of fifth grade the Middle School met with me to ensure my son’s transition went well.  The meeting included the principal, the special education teacher, the nurse, and the psychologist.  Based on the meeting they appeared to have their act together.  We talked about the various types of support my son would need.  They appeared to be very diligent in addressing these needs.  It was obvious to me that this school operated completely different than my son’s elementary school.

One of the best things that the Middle School provided is an orientation week before school started so that the students could get their bearing in the big middle school.  This school was the biggest middle school in our state and was quite overwhelming for students at first. 

In this orientation week they ensured that the student knew where their locker was and how to open it. The showed them where their home room was, which was the room they went to first thing in the morning and last thing in the day.  They were showed where the special education room was and explained what time of the day they would be coming there.  They showed  where their house was located (the grade was divided into houses, very much like Harry Potter) and the house location served as the hub for most of their standard classes such as English, Math, Social Studies, etc.  They also showed where art classes and physical education classes occurred.  For physical education they explained what to expect as it relates to another locker, clothing, showering, etc.  And finally they explained the bus routine.  This was a new thing for my son because he had not ridden the bus up to this point.  All in all I think this was a wonderful program.  The school brought together the population of four elementary schools into one seventh grade class at the middle school.

Parents were also invited to an orientation which was basically a demonstration of the rules, preparing the parents for middle school.  Believe it or not, I wasn’t anxious about this transitional year until I went to this meeting.  One of the big topics was school absences, which I was really concerned about.  I talked to the Vice Principal after the meeting about this topic and explained that my son would be using up his absences in no time, just for the purpose of going to doctor appointments.  At this point my son was seeing a neuropsychologist every three weeks.  He also saw his neurologist every three months.  The Vice Principal told me to not worry about it.  The absences were understandable.  Later, I learned the absences were a bigger deal that what the Vice Principal led on.

So we were set to start sixth grade.  I use the work “we” because the transition was not only for my son, but also for me.  It was like starting all over again with new people.  I explained to my son that this was an opportunity for us to start out new and not be impacted by personal prejudices that some of his previous teachers had shown.  He was looking forward to the year and was glad he was out of elementary school.

To be continued . . .

Our Experience . . . (continued 4)

As I mentioned in my previous blog, it was in third grade when my son started falling behind in school.  It is also when he started to have some unusual movements and vocalizations, which may have been Tourette Syndrome or Non-epileptic seizures. 

After the school year for third grade was done, I got my son a tutor, which was his second grade teacher who he truly loved.  She worked with him on reading and actually got him advanced up two levels on leveled books.  Keep in mind I paid to have this tutor, which we did two summers in a row.

For fourth grade the school put my son into Special Education for both reading, language, and math.  The remaining classes were in his mainstream class.  After about two months the special education teacher wanted to meet with me.  In this meeting, which also included the Principal and the school social worker, their big complaint was that my son was having too many tics.  My reaction was “And so?”  We had been doing everything we could medically.  We had tried medications with no success.  My son was also seeing a neuropsychologist every three weeks. 

The second complaint was that my son needed guidance from the teacher in order to do his work.  Hello!  He’s in Special Education!  Isn’t that one of the principles of Special Education.  She also said that if she gave direction involving three different things.  He would follow through on one of them and then stop.  He could not remember the remaining two things.  She also complained that he could have gotten clues by looking around at the other five children in the room, because they were all doing the same thing.  Instead he would just sit there doing nothing.

I wasn’t surprised by any of this.  This was no different from what we experienced at home.  Over the years we learned to compensate for this without even knowing we were doing it.  We only gave him instructions one at a time.  There were somethings that we just didn’t ask him to do, because it would take too long, especially on busy mornings as he got ready to go to school.

Finally in this meeting the school suggested that we shift my son to a new room that had fewer children in it and could get more attention from the teacher.  The odd thing was the teacher was actually the social worker in the school.  She had no background in teaching special education.  This decision turned into a big disaster.  My son was then stuck with this woman through fifth grade.  We talked about teaching him “touch math,” which they only did for a couple of weeks and then went back to the one minute timed drills.  End result more tics.

The biggest problem with her was the fact that she punished him for having tics.  She gave him no privacy when he was having a bout of tics.  She expected him to be able to continue working as he was having the extreme movement tics and vocalizations.  Probably the most debilitating aspect of her teaching method was that she had no empathy for his circumstance. 

Toward the middle of third grade I read in the school newsletter that they were going to offer reading tutoring for kids and it indicated we would be getting additional information about this in the near future.  I was really excited about this because my son needed the help.  At the time he was almost two grades behind in reading.  So I waited for the second communication.  I waited, and waited.  Finally I reached out to the principal.  He responded that the program was done and was limited to a select number of kids.  I was furious.  He admitted this was an attempt at increasing their test scores for reading.  The only students that got tutored were students who were on the border of being behind in their grade.

My response to him was he had better watch out, because he is going to get sued.  Here I had been paying for a tutor which was an expenditure I could not really afford.  I was obvious my son needed help.  I told the principal that he was discriminating against my son.  I could tell he was not prepared for this reaction from me.  In the next year they had this tutoring program again and my son was invited. Now I don’t know if he got his equal fair share of tutoring, but he wasn’t excluded. 

Continued. . .