There are times where parenting is a little harder than others. Each child goes through times where they may need a little more from you than others. It is a pretty continual rotation of needy-ness around here as you can imagine, but typically it isn’t too overwhelming.
Lately though with all the frustration and stress over how on earth to try and get this house sellable (not very possible) so that we can buy the one we want, we’ve still been working through the learning issues with our oldest son.
As you may remember, we went and had him tested beginning of January with a professional evaluator outside of the school district. This was NOT cheap, but we got some amazing information from that test that we wouldn’t have otherwise.
Two weeks after the evaluation was done (one week after I received the report) I gave a copy to the school phsychologist in order to get the process of tweaking his educational requirements to meet his needs. To date (over a month and a half later) nothing has been done.
Not that I’m terribly surprised, but we do know this gal (the psychologist) since we worked with her before all his modifications were dismissed at the end of last year. She had told us there would be a resolution by the end of February…anyone? Yes, that came and went without a word, and we’ve questioned CJ almost daily to see if he’d been pulled out for the testing she mentioned…answer: NO.
Deadline has come…and gone so now it is up to us. The reality of parenting a child with special learning needs means changing your way of thinking completely. We had to educate ourselves on his specific issues and are learning how he learns best. The funny thing is that even though we always said that lack of education was one of the two reasons we’d pull a child out of school (or certain classes) it is much easier said than done.
His favorite class is the last class of his school day and is taught by a man that quite simply “gets it”. He understands how most children learn and although he uses a bit of bookwork while he teaches, most of his teaching is presented in a visual, relative or hands on way. My son loves this and I’m so thankful to have had the insight into his teaching style before we had to make our decision on what to do with CJ for the remainder of the school year.
Even though we are more than halfway through, we have decided that it is pointless to keep him in the classes he is failing since the school isn’t making any effort to help him. So on Friday I’ll be making a trip down to the local district offices to fill out the necessary paperwork pulling him out of his first three classes of the day.
He will still be enrolled in his 4th 5th and 6th period classes, so we are keeping things nice and complicated. The point with that though is that he isn’t failing those classes and if the school can get their act together and figure out how to educate him we might be able to put him back in next year.