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.
The school districts put kids in boxes, they limit the services according to IQ or potential benefit. So, if a low performing Downs syndrome kid has a speech problem, no services are provided, but a high performing child might get services.
It is possible that in my case, the school district was extra attentive because they were proved wrong. The speech therapist demonstrated that my daughter had a language deficit, not a low IQ. She just got words mixed up. She could describe what an object or picture was but could not name it. The private therapist made the school speech department look like a bunch of idiots. What happened in our case was that the speech therapist wrote a letter to the school explaining where they went wrong and demanded a full evaluation and IEP. We had meetings that were like hearings. The school lost.
The teachers on the west coast are still very deficient in learning disability training. My daughter went all the way through high school before I heard the term, dyscalclia, from a friend who is a learning disabilities specialist in Florida.