What Now

It's Elementary

School wasn't easy for Billy. I mean like not in kindergarden through fifth grade. Luckily for us, Billy had a great Kindergarden teacher. Mrs Stanley had 18 years of special education in her background, and as the school year went on she helped me navigate public education and getting Billy the help he needed.

First we got our foot in the door with speech. Do you know how hard it is to learn to read when you can't make the sounds correctly? This was due in part because of his high pallet. By third grade most kids go from learning to read to reading to learn, well Billy could tell you all the "rules" he learned in speech, but was still decoding sentences.

We also noticed that his fine motor skills weren't very good so he would get hung up on writing. In third grade they graduated him from speech and into occupational therapy. His reading was catching up. It helped that we would use unabridged audiobook for him to follow along with so that his brain could start comprehending the stories and stop trying to decode each word. Every year I went to IEP meetings, this is short for individual education plans. Here's the problem though, they are only as good as the teacher following them. They would tell me homework should only be taking up thirty minutes a night. I tried explaining that maybe the case but it took 2-3 hours to get him to stop whining about the work and then constant supervision to make sure he stayed on task. Homework was no small task at our home.

I remember in third grade one of the first assignments he had was to make a poster board about himself. He drew, and he wrote his own sentences with his awful handwriting, I corrected his spelling, he'd find pictures on the computer and print them out. We spent a good chunk of time working on this poster board. When he got it back he received an unsatisfactory grade. Now I'm not the one to say that my child deserves a better grade than he earned but it became quickly apparent that this teacher didn't know about Billy's IEP. That week I asked the teacher if she had reviewed the IEP and what steps we should take. She admitted that it hadn't been sent to her yet, and we were a month into school.

The funny part of this is also third grade is the ONLY time Billy ever got in trouble enough to warrant a note home. He got a "Roar" for talking too much in class. We kinda thought this might be a joke, because if you asked any of his teachers, he was a quiet hard working student that was a daisy picker. Now if he got in trouble for zoning out, that I would understand. That was also part of his IEP. Billy worked at a snails pace. Mrs Stanley caught it first saying he wasn't a troublemaker, but just worked to the beat of his own drum. This is why she warned me his learning disability might not get caught.

We were part of a group of students that joined the year round track at our school, and the beauty of this was Billy was comfortable around these kids. By fifth grade he was able to give a speech in front of the class without crying, this is how shy he was. He knew most of these kids from kindergarten and still he was mostly shy, but these were his friends. These were the ones we loving refer to at the kindergarten crew.

Fifth grade brought on challenges of its own. I call it the year of endless projects. Our teacher was obsessed with the kids preparing for middle school. He had just moved over as a sixth grade teacher. He was always assigning projects over breaks. This might have been a good concept for families with a student who was more able to prepare but this teacher would never remember to email me and let me know how to modify this project for Billy's IEP. So there we were agonizing and arguing over a report that would be due when he'd have to go back to school, just finishing the books to get to writing the reports was a challenge. This teacher would forget Billy was to be given extra time for reading. Honestly I just got to the point where I as a mother was no longer equipped to handle helping a fifth grader with the project. I could easily do the project on my own but understand that's not the point of these projects. I am not a teacher, I do not have the skills to teach in various ways, nor the patience.

Fifth grade we ended up with multiple IEP meetings, because project after project his teacher wouldn't communicate modifications for Billy. We went as far as getting Billy a phone so he could use the speech to text function, so he could get his ideas out faster than trying to write or type. He would also say how Billy needed to ask for help on his own. We agreed but explained this just wasn't his personality. He didn't want to stand out. He already felt like the slow kid in class, it was honestly heartbreaking.

For the last fifth grade project I hired a college student to come in and help Billy because I didn't want my child to hate me because of school work. At the end of the year there was a transitional IEP meeting  to go from elementry school to middle school. Now mind you the schools schedule these IEP meetings, I take time off of work to go to these IEP meetings, and imagine my surprise when I get there and not only is his principal not there but his teacher is not there because they had a scheduling conflict. I about screamed, it's not like taking off work at 1:30 was convenient for me. I let the IEP team know the full extent of where my anger was coming from and what I fully expected from the middle school the next year. How I worried about not only trying to communicate Billy's IEP to one teacher, but now four. They assured me it would be ok, middle school would be a turning point, and not as hard as his fifth grade teacher had made it seem.