Update IEP request for math/reading comprehension

[deebee]

An update on my daughter’s first IEP meeting last week. This meeting was in response to my request to have my daughter evaluated for an IEP.

adhdldsupport.proboards107.com/index.cgi?board=public&action=display&thread=2431

The meeting started off with a request for me to explain what I felt my dd’s problems were. I explained that she had an older brother who when he was younger had a suspected genetic disability. How he struggled through school, but got little if any academic assistance. Now I’m seeing this exact same learning pattern in my daughter.

This last trimester she had two B-’s, and four F’s.

From her testing, she has a reading ability of a 10th grader, but her comprehension is below grade level. She struggles to remember information from long reading passages. She does better at answering questing about who, where, when. She struggles with inferential, cause/effect questions. This impact her ability in reading, science, and social studies. However, she can do well on rote memory skills like spelling and vocabulary words. She loved when teacher taught a song to memorize the 50 states .

She has significant struggles in math. While she can do okay on rote memory skills (such as math facts) where she struggles is in problems with more than 1 digit numbers. She makes frequent errors in multiple digit problems. She struggles with being able to understand graph and visual information. She has many areas in math that she isn’t understanding and she misses every question with those concepts (subtracting a fraction from a whole number, converting a fraction to a %, finding a portion of a number, ie what is 1/3 of 240, etc)..

In 22q11.2 (the genetic disorder brother was thought to have) there are neurological differences in the brain, that impact the child’s ability to do math. The posterior parietal lobes are smaller. This part of the brain is involved in enumeration, spatial relationships, and judging distances. It is also involved in encoding visual information to be sent to working memory. Dd’s testing showed that her visual memory is only 21%, compared to auditory memory which is 65%. In 22q there are also problems with the left and right sides of the brain being able to communicate with one another.

I’m concerned with dd’s moods/emotions and ability to interact with others. All teachers report she is more withdrawn this year. She is still pretending to be sick, trying to get out of school.

Neuropsych testing showed motor problems, and we are currently in process of an OT evaluation.

Dd struggles with organization. Hasn’t always been filling out planner, so I’m not sure if she is being honest when the planner comes home, if this is all the homework she has. She often does homework, but then doesn’t turn in.

All three of her teachers agreed with this profile. Although her reading teacher wasn’t sure how much of missing assignments might involve inferential reading. Everyone noted that her behavior does stand out as different.

Her homeroom teacher is trying a positive behavior support. She made a “deal” with dd that if she completed all her homework for the month of March (which was about 2 weeks) that teacher would bring a Wii system to school, and she would play guitar hero with daughter. Since dd started antidepressant last week, she is noting an improvement in mood.

School seemed to thing that everything was on track, that we’re seeing increased compliance with doing homework and daughter’s mood is getting better. Homeroom teacher stated dd is doing well in her class, reading teacher noted some missing assignments, but stated if turned in then dd would be passing. Math teacher initially wasn’t present. I stated I knew dd was failing, she has had F’s on all class assignments and had a D on the last test. I stated she needed help in math to get her on track.

School asked if dd had ever done homework club after school. I stated she had gone at beginning of the year, but there were several problems. First, daughter seldom did homework, she would just take a book and read. Other times she would skip homework club and just leave school and go to friends house or go home (I’m at work at that time of day). I also stated there was one teacher to many kids and she didn’t get any homework help.

The school stated they would get someone to work 1:1 with daughter at homework club. I agreed to try this option until Spring Break (which means she would do this all of next week).

I’m waiting for the addendum to daughter’s recent neuropsych evaluation which will have her diagnosis codes (ADHD), as well as for her outside OT evaluation to be done next Friday. Hopefully by the time spring break is over I will have all this information. The school never mentioned the FBA that I requested be done so I’m going to follow up with a letter regarding this.

Is this a normal response to IEP request. Would this be considered a “Response to Intervention”. How long do we have to try the school’s method before I can state that dd is not making enough progress and needs more??

[charliegirl]

One thing they should have included was to have the teachers check her agenda to make sure she has all her assignments listed in it and to ask her for her homework when she didn't turn it in.

Once you have the full nueuropsych's report you should know what you are dealing with and can zero in on what specifically to ask for. If you are willing to share the report here, we have members who are good at figuring out what it means and what she will need to see progress.

Right to Intervention is a way to determine whether a child has an ld. Since you had her tested by a neuropsych, that shouldn't apply to her. I think they will have to go by the testing results.

It sounds to me like they are offering what support they can to try to help her as much as possible until you get the report back. If this seems to be helping her they may try to convince you its all she needs regardless of what the report says. Once you have the report you will be better able to determine what your next steps should be.

[deebee]

The school has already received the "full neuropsych" report, which is quite short, and only contains minimal scores. What I was waiting for was neuropsych agreed to provide a diagnosis sheet based on the evaluation. This is what he added:

314.00 ADHD, predominately innatentive type
294.9 Cognitive Disorder NOS with mild memory deficit
311 Depression

Also completed OT exam with outside evaluator. She feels dd has visual processing disorder and visual/motor problems. She is willing to be part of IEP team, and has some good ideas in regards to visual motor and adapations/modifications. I think this is great.

My only concern is that I don't think the school nor the OT understands dd's processing problems with math. For example, on Monday at Homework club she did lesson 75, and missed 12 out of 30 questions. So today teacher had her redo the problems. Not only did she miss the same questions, but she had the exact SAME wrong answers that she had before. This tells me this is not just inattention, but involves how she is mentally processing the math problems.

For example: 16 and 2/3 + 16 and 2/3, both times she had 17 1/3.
another problem... 5/9 + 5/9 and her answer both times 1 1/10.

[rakuflames]

Mar 15, 2008 9:14:00 GMT -5 deebee said:

An update on my daughter’s first IEP meeting last week. This meeting was in response to my request to have my daughter evaluated for an IEP.

adhdldsupport.proboards107.com/index.cgi?board=public&action=display&thread=2431

The meeting started off with a request for me to explain what I felt my dd’s problems were. I explained that she had an older brother who when he was younger had a suspected genetic disability. How he struggled through school, but got little if any academic assistance. Now I’m seeing this exact same learning pattern in my daughter.

This last trimester she had two B-’s, and four F’s.

From her testing, she has a reading ability of a 10th grader, but her comprehension is below grade level. She struggles to remember information from long reading passages. She does better at answering questing about who, where, when. She struggles with inferential, cause/effect questions. This impact her ability in reading, science, and social studies. However, she can do well on rote memory skills like spelling and vocabulary words. She loved when teacher taught a song to memorize the 50 states .

She has significant struggles in math. While she can do okay on rote memory skills (such as math facts) where she struggles is in problems with more than 1 digit numbers. She makes frequent errors in multiple digit problems. She struggles with being able to understand graph and visual information. She has many areas in math that she isn’t understanding and she misses every question with those concepts (subtracting a fraction from a whole number, converting a fraction to a %, finding a portion of a number, ie what is 1/3 of 240, etc)..

In 22q11.2 (the genetic disorder brother was thought to have) there are neurological differences in the brain, that impact the child’s ability to do math. The posterior parietal lobes are smaller. This part of the brain is involved in enumeration, spatial relationships, and judging distances. It is also involved in encoding visual information to be sent to working memory. Dd’s testing showed that her visual memory is only 21%, compared to auditory memory which is 65%. In 22q there are also problems with the left and right sides of the brain being able to communicate with one another.

I’m concerned with dd’s moods/emotions and ability to interact with others. All teachers report she is more withdrawn this year. She is still pretending to be sick, trying to get out of school.

Neuropsych testing showed motor problems, and we are currently in process of an OT evaluation.

Dd struggles with organization. Hasn’t always been filling out planner, so I’m not sure if she is being honest when the planner comes home, if this is all the homework she has. She often does homework, but then doesn’t turn in.

All three of her teachers agreed with this profile. Although her reading teacher wasn’t sure how much of missing assignments might involve inferential reading. Everyone noted that her behavior does stand out as different.

Her homeroom teacher is trying a positive behavior support. She made a “deal” with dd that if she completed all her homework for the month of March (which was about 2 weeks) that teacher would bring a Wii system to school, and she would play guitar hero with daughter. Since dd started antidepressant last week, she is noting an improvement in mood.

School seemed to thing that everything was on track, that we’re seeing increased compliance with doing homework and daughter’s mood is getting better. Homeroom teacher stated dd is doing well in her class, reading teacher noted some missing assignments, but stated if turned in then dd would be passing. Math teacher initially wasn’t present. I stated I knew dd was failing, she has had F’s on all class assignments and had a D on the last test. I stated she needed help in math to get her on track.

School asked if dd had ever done homework club after school. I stated she had gone at beginning of the year, but there were several problems. First, daughter seldom did homework, she would just take a book and read. Other times she would skip homework club and just leave school and go to friends house or go home (I’m at work at that time of day). I also stated there was one teacher to many kids and she didn’t get any homework help.

The school stated they would get someone to work 1:1 with daughter at homework club. I agreed to try this option until Spring Break (which means she would do this all of next week).

I’m waiting for the addendum to daughter’s recent neuropsych evaluation which will have her diagnosis codes (ADHD), as well as for her outside OT evaluation to be done next Friday. Hopefully by the time spring break is over I will have all this information. The school never mentioned the FBA that I requested be done so I’m going to follow up with a letter regarding this.

Is this a normal response to IEP request. Would this be considered a “Response to Intervention”. How long do we have to try the school’s method before I can state that dd is not making enough progress and needs more??

The rules very from state to state but they are required by federal law to try things that are lower-level than an IEP first, so ... this is typical and not "fudging" on their part.

[charliegirl]

They have the right to give her a 504 if the discrepancy between IQ and achievement doesn't meet the state guidelines. Do you know what the discrepancy is? If it meets the guidelines they have to give an IEP.

I'm still trying to get an answer from the federal disability site as to whether or not the neuro can legally keep her scores from you. Hopefully someone will give me an answer soon.

[lcdc1]

that is so much information that I am not a good one to comment. BUT, I do know in my kids situation, that in 5th grade they did this intervention thing and tutoring and I paid for private tutoring and other stuff was set up in school. Then in 7th grade when we went through formal testing and determintatio for eligibility, the intervention stuff from 5th grade was considered as helping our case to get Ran on an IEP.

[lillian]

I'm confused about the genetic disorder. Your son does not have this disorder, but you think your daughter does? Your son was tested, but your daughter has not been?

[deebee]

lillian
My son tested negative for 22q11.2. However, my understanding is that a negative test doesn't completely rule out the possibility of having the disorder. There are about 5% of the people who have a clinical diagnosis without having proof of the genetic deletion. I'm trying to get my son into the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (which is one of the largest hospitals for research on 22q). With recent changes in allowed Medicaid expenses, I don't know if this will be a possibility or not.

My son was tested in 1998 when he was 8, and I never gave the disorder another thought. When he was 15, a psych that had completed a psychiatric report, had told me that many of my son's symptoms we were seeing, were possible early indicators of schizophrenia. As I started researching schizophrenia, I came back across information on 22q11.2 and the prevalance of schizophrenia and psychiatric problems in this disorder. I also found information on the learning profile (NLD) that is commonly found in 22q11.2.

So in answer to your question. You are right my son has tested negative (although I still believe he likely would receive a clinical diagnosis for 22q based on the large number of symptoms that he meets). My dd has not been tested, and likely will not as our insurance will not pay for it.

[rakuflames]

Mar 22, 2008 15:22:24 GMT -5 deebee said:

The school has already received the "full neuropsych" report, which is quite short, and only contains minimal scores. What I was waiting for was neuropsych agreed to provide a diagnosis sheet based on the evaluation. This is what he added:

314.00 ADHD, predominately innatentive type
294.9 Cognitive Disorder NOS with mild memory deficit
311 Depression

Also completed OT exam with outside evaluator. She feels dd has visual processing disorder and visual/motor problems. She is willing to be part of IEP team, and has some good ideas in regards to visual motor and adapations/modifications. I think this is great.

My only concern is that I don't think the school nor the OT understands dd's processing problems with math. For example, on Monday at Homework club she did lesson 75, and missed 12 out of 30 questions. So today teacher had her redo the problems. Not only did she miss the same questions, but she had the exact SAME wrong answers that she had before. This tells me this is not just inattention, but involves how she is mentally processing the math problems.

For example: 16 and 2/3 + 16 and 2/3, both times she had 17 1/3.
another problem... 5/9 + 5/9 and her answer both times 1 1/10.

What's interesting about these is that they are two different kinds of mistakes.

That makes me think there is a visual component, but in fairness to the schol, this kind of visual processing problem in math is not typical. I raised a child like yours, with AD/HD and a visual processing problem that affected math. But I also think the AD/HD could be part of the problem.

Were these problems written vertically or horizontally?

Here's what I would do if she were my student: I would separate the problem into two problems: whole numbers and fractions, and then have her add those two answers together.

If she had trouble remembering the steps for this approach, here is what I would do:

I would draw a box for each sub-answer, and then draw two boxes, a plus sign and a horizontal line, and a box for the final answer. This would provide visual structure to help her remember what she was doing.

Then she can focus just on the fractions (where the difficulties probably occur. In the first problem, she gave the correct answer for the fractions alone. In the second problem she got that it was ninths, or she wouldn't have come up with 1 1/anything ... but she put the ten (5 + 5, the numerators added together) as the final denominator. This suggests to me that distractibility is part of the problem: ten and nine are close together and that can make such a mistake more likely.

PS: after she was very comfortable using the boxes when I drew them, I would have her start setting up the problems herself that way. That's where the real learning would occur. When kids are distractible AND have a visual processing problem, they have to overlearn the math processes or they just won't retain them.

Today's math instruction programs, which are based on discovery, don't support that approach, but it is most certainly what I would have done as an LD teacher with a child who has both AD/HD and a visual processing problem.

[lillian]

So, this disorder runs in your family, which is the reason you suspect that your children have it?