I don’t know where you live, but in Orange County, the schools contact Orange County Public Health and Orange County mental health. If the school hasn’t done that for you, you need to call them yourself as well as make a complaint to the school district, special needs dept. I’m surprised that your pediatrician didn’t put you in contact with the public health dept. If the services are there, you may as well take advantage of them. You are paying for them.
I had to contact a private speech therapist to get speech therapy for my daughter’s language deficit. The California schools are way behind in identifying specific learning disabilities and want to lump them all under low IQ, which is sometimes indeterminable, when it’s hidden beneath several layers of disability.
I’ve been in contact with everyone I can, including a lawyer. I’m in San Jose, and our district is notorious for being bad. It’s like they are okay if your child has autism or down syndrome, but not if it is something out of the box.
After talking to a lawyer and a friend who actually won a case against her school district, we decided just to get the services privately. We’ve had good health insurance that has paid for a lot, and then we max out our health saving account.
I have a pretty good selection of private therapists/doctors by now (speech, occupational, psychologist, psychiatrist, neurologist).
A lot of the problem is that she is high functioning in so many ways. She goes to a regular private junior high, and is getting A’s & B’s with little accomodations.
The worst year was 3rd grade. She was having all these strange symptoms (covering her ears and shouting “shut up” “shut up”, and terrible melt-downs, lots of headaches), and I didn’t know what was going on. The district just thought I was crazy. All the specialist thought it was just stress, but they were wrong. I finally took her back to the neurologist, and before we could have an EEG, she had a grand mal seizure. Once she got on anti-seizure medication, the strange behaviors stopped.
We’re lucky because we can afford to send her to private therapists/school. I feel so sorry for families that can’t do that.
The most frustrating part for me is that the school district led us down the wrong path for her on many occasions. They never told us she needed to be taught sign language. They literally told us she didn’t need it, and it would hurt her. Even if they would have said, we can’t provide the services, but this is what she needs. Our district lied to us about things.
I have to let it go, but I really hate that my taxes go to fund the district.