School refusing doctors' evaluations

Post Reply New Topic

Anybody have experience with handling a school that refused to accept your doctors' evaluations? He was evaluated by an MD, a PhD, and a specialist in speech pathology. He was not only diagnosed with ASD, but also dyslexia and ADHD. They are refusing to develop an IEP for him based on the fact that he is doing well in school at the moment. We don't want to wait for him to do poorly before action is taken.

And FYI - we live in Mississippi, where help is not required by state law for dyslexia.

Get an educational advocate. In my state (and I'm not sure if it's national or not), there are now "twice exceptional" laws, which mean the DOE is required to give services even if your kid is not behind if the evaluations show your child is unable to reach his/ her own potential based on cognitive tests. Look into this.

Lawyer up!

A lawyer might help you determine what your current options are, even if it is only to send a letter to the school board that says, "... as legal counsel for my client in this case, I am looking forward to a swift resolution to this matter ..."

And usually (at least in the schools around here), you just need to mention "lawyer", that you are seeking legal counsel, or the word "mediation" and suddenly the support team at the school becomes much more accommodating. It is (sadly) often that they are trying to get away with not paying for services, but don't want a legal issue. They rely on a lot of parents not knowing they can push back.

You need to find an educational advocate -- a consultant not an attorney -- who can help you make the case for the IEP. Are there any social, behavioral, or "functional" skills he struggles with? IEP's can have goals for these areas even if there is no academic need for one.

We just found out that one of my parent's good friends is the director of special education for our state. We setting up a meeting to find out what rights our son has in our state. And we also found out that my parent's friends also have a child on the spectrum and are about to enroll their daughter in the same school as our kids. Hopefully they will add some weight to the process.

I don't mean to sound like a Devil's Advocate here, but just because your kid is on the spectrum doesn't mean he will ever need an IEP. Not every autistic needs modifications or supports to the degree that they require an IEP. My daughter has been diagnosed since she was 2 and has not had an IEP since preschool because she hasn't needed one (when she started pre-school she was minimally verbal and required an IEP). Since kindergarten, she has received social supports (social skills groups and 1:1 interventions as needed), but we have not attached them to a formal IEP. She does not require any modifications academically. For the social stuff, there are no formalized goals, and no data collection. Just a close collaboration between her teachers and I, and a response from the school that is appropriate to her needs. For example, she has done things ranging from small group social skills (turn taking, conversational skills, perspective taking, friendship awareness, etc) to 1:1 work (identifying and avoiding "triggers," stress relief, self-advocacy, etc.)

In what areas do you see your son struggling? Does he have academic issues? Does he have social issues? I think it is important to understand things from the school's perspective: they have limited resources. If you cannot articulate what sort of supports your son needs, and they see no evidence that he needs supports, they will have difficulty allocating some of their limited resources to a kid for whom no one can identify a concrete need. I think you will have greater success if you approach the school saying "My son needs support in the following areas:" instead of "My son has a diagnosis, and you need to provide him support even though no one can articulate in what way he needs it."

I want you to know that I do feel your pain. When my son was first evaluated, they told me that he could not receive services unless he fell behind. The difference for him, and what I wish I would have understood back then but didn't, is that even though academically he was on target, he still should have received services in non-academic areas, such as OT (he has horrible dysgraphia and sensory integration issues), speech (pragmatic issues) and social support (his behavior was barely manageable according to his teachers). I didn't understand that he could receive non-academic supports, nor could I articulate what I thought he needed, so he didn't get anything.

It seems unnecessary to have an IEP if a child does well in school without one.
Looking back on when I was a child, I didn't need an IEP when I was doing well in high school.
Having one would have been a burden, and absolutely useless to me.
I only had one in grade school when I had far fewer adaptive abilities than in high school.
And one in junior high when the transition from grade school to junior high was hard for me.

Initiating an IEP before a child needs it is actually a better strategy. Having dyslexia, ADHD and being on the spectrum means that is really a good way to go. I'm sorry to hear support for dyslexia is not required though.

I would push the issue, although, I would not go atomic (lawyer, external consultant), until necessary. I say this for a couple reasons, my personal experience:

My daughter did ok-good, not great, in school, but never had any problems. She would be way ahead of everyone in many things, but her work would not show it unless it interested her at the time. This is how it was from preschool, and even though we new she was different, we never had any diagnosis. We pushed, and eventually were able to get her evaluated for an IEP for gifted. It took a while, but eventually she did, and it definitely helped in some ways, as she seemed a bit more excited for school than before. However, by the time she got to the end of 6th grade, her problems at school began to increase exponentially; socially, anxiety, other common symptoms. She had these issues before, but I presume because of puberty, they became amplified. I ended up having to take her out of state to get diagnosed, and even after providing all the documentation (they accepted), they took to long to really take any action. A year later, and now I am having to sort-of-home-school her (online program).

Now, my son is in 3rd grade, and we have long suspected him to be on the spectrum. It was because of him I researched Autism, and began to realize my daughter was likely on the spectrum. He is considered a model student at school, advanced in all areas, and we are now trying to go through the same steps with him, armed with more information. At this point, he was screened once for gifted, but did poorly, because he was very anxious (they tested him in a group, and told him what it was for, which he was loosing sleep for). Now the 2nd time around, I am had my first meeting with their Special Ed core-group. We got the same response you did, there are no problems yet, so how can they push it. After speaking with them, I started outlining issues he experiences that are not visible to them. For example, he becomes extremely anxious when they change their routine, or get a substitute at school. They don't notice it, because he doesn't have a tantrum. There are other things, that we hear about when he gets home, and needs time to alone when he gets home before he can "get over" the school day.

After hearing what I told them, we are going to try and document some of these other related issues, and go that route. If they do not get any progress this year, I will do my own diagnostics outside of the school again, and push the issue with them. As I definitely foresee problems once he gets into middle school, as they issues seem to be "growing" since Kindergarten.

I don't think there's enough information. On its surface the answer is your child is not entitled to an IEP if he is doing well and you do have to wait until he is struggling. And you may lose credibility with the school if you don't seem to know that.

But you had your child evaluated for reasons, and these diagnoses were based on observations and reports. When you think about what the concerns were that led to the diagnoses that may help. Then there's also the question whether you think he is doing well enough, academically and socially, and if he is, I would leave this alone.

But it's hard to believe that he was diagnosed with all these things and there's no problem for him at school, even if they do not identify his struggles as problematic. Think also about what were the recommendations of the professionals who evaluated your child with regard to school, and maybe talk to them about what can be done. Since you had him evaluated it would seem like you feel there are areas of difficulty, I would suggest looking for ways you can address these issues or get him help through local professionals if this is possible. If you wait for the school to act, things will have to be worse than you want before that happens. Plus it looks good to them when other things have been tried when they have a complaint, for example teacher says "your son is not reading as well as we'd like, have him practice independent reading 15 minutes a day" you say "the teacher at (local reading support program) tells me to have him play games with letters and read with him 5 minutes at a time". Obviously that may not be where your son is, but they expect you to try and fail first before they offer special Ed.

And if you just want him to get a little TLC, would a 504 Plan help? That costs them almost nothing, can offer tests in a separate location, no services to solve problems, but also a bit of help organizing homework etc. and it's much easier to get than an IEP.

I will third or fourth the advocate idea, and found this list http://www.msdh.state.ms.us/msdhsite/in ... rvices.pdf

Lawyer is the nuclear option: an advocate is not; it's standard practice. If the school reacts negatively to an advocate, they are probably aware that they are doing something wrong. You have a right to bring someone with you - and even if you think the school is on your side, it's impossible to think clearly at an IEP meeting; I recommend everyone have an advocate if for no other reason than to keep themselves grounded. Not a bad idea to research lawyers, but that shouldn't be your first move.

I think it's a great idea to get in touch with your state office, more here: http://www.mde.k12.ms.us/OSE

Social skills and pragmatic speech can and should be included in an IEP with goals - I'm not trying to stir the pot, InThisTogether, I'm sure your daughter is getting what she needs, but for your way to work, the entire school needs to be behind you. Without an IEP, if you wind up with a teacher who doesn't understand, you are stuck.

Also, a 504 is not sufficient if it is a skill that needs to be learned; often this is another way a school does an end-run around providing services. (A 504 would be effective for something like allowing breaks, or sensory fidgets, etc.) In fact, functional skills are required to be a part of an IEP if needed, and can comprise an entire IEP - my son only has pragmatics in his right now and he's not falling behind in anything academically. All special education does in this instance is create a structure for a theraputic "class" just like all the other graded classes your child is in...but it's a special one, created just for your child. Goals are basically grades, benchmarks to see if your child is learning what they're teaching.

SCHOOLS CANNOT REFUSE SERVICES BECAUSE YOUR CHILD IS AT ACADEMIC GRADE LEVEL!! ! We didn't know this, and as a result, my son went without much-needed therapy for years. This is not a state law, it is Federal law - schools can argue that the law states that a disability must "adversely impact their education" but they need to be reminded that IDEA specifically considers functional skills (life skills like socialization, organization, etc.) to be part of a child's education.

See http://www.wrightslaw.com/info/2e.index.htm (your child does not have to be gifted for this to apply - only that he needs other supports.)

Also http://cectag.com/wp-content/uploads/20 ... evised.pdf

And, more importantly