train wreck

I want this blog to be a place of hope, but before I get there, I have to talk about the dark places we have been.  It is hard to be this vulnerable.  If I am a typical special needs parent, I am too guarded to share the experiences in the trenches.  Afraid we (both my kid and myself) will be judged; afraid we will be misunderstood; afraid people will pity us.  And the biggest barrier, for me at least, is not wanting to ever shine a negative light on my son.  What I do want to expose is the way our special education system has failed him.

Last year was a train wreck. In the interest of brevity for this post, I will share just a sample of experiences from third grade that brought us to the decision to homeschool. After a relatively relaxed and enjoyable summer, September hit us like a brick wall.  BW would come home from school in a whirlwind of emotion, destroying everything in it’s path, and the breakdown would continue until he crashed from exhaustion. One particular night, I pushed too hard while working on his homework and he broke down.  Tears and raw emotion spilled out of him as he described how he wanted to get a gun and kill himself.  My daughter and I shared in a heartbreak like no other as BW went on and on about not wanting to live anymore.  All we could do was hold him and cry.  BW was 8 and hated his life.  The next day, I did two things.  I made him an appointment with a therapist, and I went down to his school and demanded his homework to be cut in half.

In October, we had our fall conferences.  I was rattled when it came to light that his general education teacher didn’t know his reading level, saying she didn’t get to “all the kids” yet.  Later, someone would go back and fill in the blank with an “N”, which our gut told us was completely inaccurate.  Advised by BW’s new therapist, we went to a neuropsychologist for a full evaluation (6 hours long).  She diagnosed him with dyslexia and said he was reading at a first grade level (equivalent would be about an “H”).  This was in January.  We took the report to the school.  It took us until March to finally get a meeting in place.  We were told by the school psychologist that they could not accept the doctor’s results because (a)they don’t recogize a “dyslexia” diagnosis and (b) the test the neuropsychologist gave him “did not have two subsets”.  The school said they would need to do their own evaluation.  Legally, the school has 30 school days to complete an evaluation.  The school psychologist “miscounted” and we did not have a report in hand until the middle of May.  The school’s results showed that BW was reading at a level “I”, and though this did not trigger a learning disability in the area of decoding specifically, he did qualify for a learning disability in the area of reading comprehension.  Because it was already May and we were tired, we signed off on the evaluation, marking it as a partial win.  His actual revised proposed IEP (he had not had an IEP we supported since December)  was given to us the third from the last day of school for the year.  Parents are legally given 14 calendar days to accept or reject a proposed IEP.  If a child is already on an IEP, the new IEP will automatically go into effect on the 14th calendar day if it is not rejected in writing.  So, I rejected it in writing, even though it was returned to an empty school in the middle of June.

Meanwhile, BW’s behavior at school had completely derailed.  As I mentioned in A Tough Pill to Swallow, once BW’s behavior had become disruptive in school, we made the decision to medicate.  However, despite the improvements we saw at home, behaviors continued to escalate at school.  He would refuse to go to the classes he didn’t like, screaming, running, and climbing cubbies in hallways.  He would throw violent tantrums and clear rooms. He would get into altercations with other children in the resource room (more on that later).  I would get more and more frequent legal notices that school personnel had put him in a “hold”, which is a nice word for “restrain”. He would spend large amounts of time in the break room, or with the principal, or anywhere else they could put him to keep him from being disruptive.  Our mouths would drop at the reports we were getting from school, as it seemed like they were not talking about the child we knew.  And the school’s lack of a sense of urgency dumbfounded us.

All of this time, other children are in their classes learning, and my son is getting further and further behind. It was clear what we were doing was not working.  The general perspective is that homeschooling a child with special needs is ill-advised.  We think sending him back to a broken system is detrimental.