Last year, my son Benjy began to struggle
both academically and socially in first grade. On the playground, he
refused to play with other kids, even when his teacher encouraged him
and suggested friends and games to play with them. In the classroom,
Benjy would lay his head down during writing assignments and get easily
frustrated while reading, often hitting himself in the head. He
struggled to come up with topics to write about and found it difficult
to put his thoughts on paper. Any noise from his classmates distracted
him and caused him to lose focus on his assignment. At home, he would
struggle with his homework for more than an hour and needed constant
encouragement and help to get through it.
As a parent, it is always difficult to watch your child struggle, but
luckily Benjy had a fabulous teacher, Kristina McSwain, who was also
noticing the problems that he was having and began to intervene.
Kristina and I met in person, and she developed a PEP (personal
education plan) for Benjy to address the areas in which he was having
the most difficulties. She gave me her cell number, and we talked often
about Benjy’s progress and about modifications that she was doing in the
classroom and the things that I could do to help him at home. During
reading, she would set Benjy away from all the other students, so that
he wouldn’t be able to hear them read as well. When he still complained
about the noise, she suggested I get him a whisper phone, which is a
low-tech device that a beginning reader whispers into and the sound is
amplified into his ear, making it easier to focus on his own reading.
For homework, Kristina suggested frequent breaks and to not push him too
hard, but to get as much homework done as we could without worrying
about doing it all. It was more important for Benjy to enjoy learning
than to have him stress about it. In writing, Kristina would go to Benjy
after giving all the students a writing prompt and help him brainstorm
ideas. Often, she would email me the prompt so that Benjy and I could
discuss ideas at home the day before, and he would be more prepared and
know what to expect at school. We found that while Benjy could tell us
what he wanted to write, getting started was often difficult. It also
didn’t help that he wanted to write perfectly, so not knowing how to
spell a word could completely derail him. Together, Kristina and I
worked to build Benjy’s self-confidence, and by the end of the year, he
had made great improvement.
What I didn’t realize then that I do realize now is that all of these
modifications for Benjy were part of the Response to Intervention (RTI)
approach to the early identification and support of students with
learning and behavior needs. Kristina had affectively implemented Tier 1
into her teaching to help Benjy succeed. I interviewed her this week,
and she confirmed that that is exactly what she had done. If Benjy had
continued to lose momentum and not shown improvement with the
interventions put in place, she would have tried other methods and
probably have suggested special education testing. We did discuss
testing at one point, but we agreed that maybe Benjy just needed more
time to develop and grasp the material. Based on my interviews with
Kristina and Amy Green, another elementary teacher, I have learned that
Benjy exhibited many classic signs of a struggling student, but there
are many more, including but not limited to: hyperactivity, poor
expressive language, trouble sleeping, eating or going to the bathroom,
and struggling to remember things.
When we moved to Bogota, Colombia, we decided that since Benjy has a
July birthday and was almost a year younger than many of his classmates,
we would have him repeat first grade at a more academically rigorous
school. Benjy is now making friends and boasts that he is the only kid
in his class reading chapter books. He completes his homework entirely
on his own and in a reasonable amount of time. As a shy child, Benjy is
still working on overcoming his anxiety in social situations and during
tests, but he has come a long way. We are confident that with continued
attention to the areas that he struggles in, Benjy will progress
academically as expected, hopefully without further intervention.
For students that don’t respond to Tier 1 interventions as Benjy did,
there is more help available. According to Jodie Rommel, director of
the Learning Center at Colegio Nueva Granada in Bogota, Colombia, most
learning disabilities are discovered in mid-first grade to second grade
as the academic standards become more challenging and abstract. Jodie
said that while this varies from school to school, when schools utilize
universal screening through Response to Intervention, struggling
students are caught early on and provided interventions starting in
kindergarten. Jodie says that parents are an integral part in the
process of determining specific learning disabilities, and that most of
them are accepting of it, although some do go through a process similar
to mourning upon learning that their child has a disability. She gave me
a wonderful essay called "Welcome to Holland," written by a parent of a
disabled child, which I will include below.
Jodie told me that at Colegio Nueva Granada (CNG), they only accept
students with disabilities that they can provide services to in their
least restrictive environment. For example, they won’t admit students
with severe aggressive behavior because they don’t have proper placement
for them. This is not uncommon for international schools, and it is up
to the parents to figure out what to do with their child. We have
friends who have experienced this first hand. One of their daughters is
diagnosed with ADHD and functions fine in school with medication;
however, in her records, it was recorded that at some point she had
violent tendencies. When she first applied to CNG, she was not admitted.
Her parents began to panic, because there were no other plausible
options in Bogota to accommodate her. Luckily, upon intervention from
the medical staff at the U.S. Embassy, CNG agreed to accept their
daughter on a provisional basis. So far, she is doing well at CNG.
However, another family who had a child with a disability was forced to
send her to boarding school until arrangements could be made for a work
transfer.
In the U.S., however, all students are provided a free and
appropriate education regardless of their needs, in compliance with IDEA
law. Public school districts have a broad range of services to include
all exceptionalities, and students with disabilities are given the
specialized education that they need to succeed. Whenever I hear the
U.S. education criticized, I always want to defend it, because, although
it’s not perfect, it’s a lot better than most of the rest of the world.
Welcome to Holland” by Emily Perl Kingsley
I am often asked to describe the
experience of raising a child with a disability—to try to help people
who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine
how it would fell. It’s like this…
When you’re going to have a baby,
it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip—to Italy. You buy a bunch
of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum, the
Michelangelo, the gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases
in Italian. It’s all very exciting.
After months of eager
anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you
go. Several hours later, the plan lands. The stewardess comes in and
says “Welcome to Holland.”
“Holland?!” you say. “What do you
mean, Holland? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All
my life I’ve dreamed of going to Itlay.”
But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they
haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting filthy place, full of
pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place.
So you must go out and buy new
guidebooks. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a
whole new group of people you would never have met.
It’s just a different place. It’s
slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been
there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around and you
begin to notice that Holland has windmills, Holland has tulips. Holland
even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy
coming and going from Italy and they’re all bragging about what a
wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will
say, “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had
planned.” And the pain of that will never, ever, ever go away because
the loss of that dream is a very significant loss.
But if you spend your life
mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to
enjoy the very special, very lovely things about Holland.
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