Warning - this is a long one. I go into details so that you can learn from my mistakes. My husband and I have fostered and adopted kids for the last 12 years. Our final foster child became our son officially almost five years ago but he melted our hearts just prior to his two month birthday when we brought him home from the hospital after several surgeries, more shocks to his heart than any child should have to endure, and with the love of a ton of nurses who really nursed him into health.
This little guy was born to his biological mother at her home. She proceeded to drop him on his head, cut his umbilical cord and not clamp it off, stab him 40 times in the trunk with a pair of scissors, and then wrap him in a wet towel and leave him under an open window shortly after Christmas. For some reason, before he was completely dead she called 9-1-1 and they came and took him to the hospital where doctors administered extraordinary medical interventions and saved his life. He has scars all over his still small body. His lungs both collapsed, his pericardium was cut, but luckily not his heart, there was liver damage that was life threatening, he lost so much blood that there was lack of oxygen to his brain which in turn caused seizures. I really don't remember all that my little love went through in those first moments of life, but it was hell. He wasn't expected to live, and once it seemed he would live he wasn't expected to do much. The doctors didn't expect him to sit up, stand, walk, eat, speak, or be able to care for even the most basic of his own needs - ever.
Our little guy doesn't do what anyone expect him to do though! He has above average intelligence according to the testing we have had done, he not only walks, he runs and climbs and rides his bike without training wheels. He can swing at a ball and hit it and he can do some amazing jumps on a trampoline. He is on track for all of his academic milestones.
There is one area that is difficult for him though. Speech and language. He actually speaks pretty well, his articulation is very good most of the time and he can put together a sentence that seems quite appropriate for a child in kindergarten. He has trouble taking in what he hears though. He likely has a condition called Auditory Processing Disorder or Central A.P.D. In our state it can't be technically diagnosed until a child is 7, so we are left knowing he has this trouble, but not being able to get a diagnosis and get him some of the help he needs because he hasn't turned seven yet. Kind of a ridiculous rule, law, whatever it is, but hey it's what we have to deal with. Pretty much what happens is he doesn't hear things exactly like they were said - I might say tangerine and he might her magazine. He also has trouble with some concepts. Mostly these are positional concepts like over, under, between, behind, first, last. He also has trouble answering "wh" questions, and the toughest of them naturally is "where". These difficulties are amplified in the classroom - lots of other noise, constant change/transitions, and a bunch of kids who don't understand that he has this difficulty.
Kindergarten classes in our district have 30 kids this year. Last year it was 20 kindergartners, this year it is 30. We worked hard to get him into the local charter school, thinking their multiple intelligences style of teaching would benefit our little guy. The charter school doesn't have all of the overhead of the large district, but since the district was putting 30 kindergartners in each class, they had no need to place fewer children in the kindergarten classes. Additionally, this made more parents happy since they could put more of their children into the charters classes. Many of us enrolled our kids in their hybrid Independent Study program which includes going to class on campus three days per week and home-schooling two days per week. My little guy was 6th on the waiting list so we could feel very secure in the knowledge that he would be in a five day a week class in first grade and then he could spend the rest of his academic days at charter school until he completed eighth grade. And by then it was expected that the charter might even have a High School.
Because charter schools are actually public schools they must take children with IEP's. This particular school doesn't take students with more severe special needs, kids who need a special day class, but they do take kids who can learn in the typical environment. this seemed like a perfect opportunity for my son. He had been in a special ed preschool class where he had a few behavior issues, but not more than you would expect from any preschooler, three incidents in two years of preschool. His speech had come along - when he first entered the program he spoke only 10 words, and what little he did say was difficult to understand. After two years in preschool with speech therapy (albeit not the best speech therapy - it was the district/county program after all) and over a year of private pay speech therapy he was able to speak clearly most of the time (anxiety has effected his speech and it gets unclear at times) and he spoke in full sentences. He seemed pretty much like any other kiddo but we knew he did need some extra help, therapy and some modifications and accommodations to benefit from his education.
We went to meetings, we got him his uniforms, we got him to school with his homework done, but after about four or five weeks we started hearing that he was behaving inappropriately in class. He was pinching some of the other children and even spitting at them. This was shocking, he hadn't done it before. We were told that this wasn't all that unusual given the severity of his speech and language deficits.
We worked in an IEP meeting to prepare a behavior support plan with school staff. He would be given positive reinforcements every half hour until he could do well with that, then the supports would move to an hour, then two times per day, then once a day, until his behaviors were acceptable. The teacher would give him small rewards, like passing out the pencils, high fives, and being the first to do an activity. I gave her stickers that were motivating for my son - Cars 2 stickers, and we would use a variety of rewards for bringing home good behavior reports , including milk shakes, toy cars, and DVD's. Each of these was predicated on increasing his positive behavior reports. the teacher had already been doing the behavior charts, but we were meeting and making it formal at an IEP meeting.
Initially I got no reports. It was so odd, because I had been getting reports prior to the meeting and once it was part of the IEP I got nothing. It took a few days to find out what was going on, but I was told the teacher thought that someone was making up a new behavior chart. Why she thought this was a mystery as her chart was fine. There had been no negative comments, no one said a new chart was needed, but what was even more unbelievable was that she felt using nothing was the strategy to use after having a meeting to discuss how vital my son's need was for support in this area.
Finally after two weeks of nothing the behavior charts were again instituted with the additional supports that were put together by the RSP teacher and the SLP. It was working! This was so great! My son's behaviors were down to no more than one per day. BUT, we had forgotten one important piece, no one had asked what happened just before my son behaved inappropriately. We all fell lock-step into the idea that he misbehaved because of his speech issues. I've read up on CAPD and I was ready to believe this, kids with CAPD often times have difficult behaviors as a result of not understanding fully what others want from them. Okay, so we believed it, but apparently no one in the classroom was at all interested in what was going on that made my little guy so angry.
Shortly after we returned from the Christmas break I observed a situation in which another child was taunting my son. This was at an award's ceremony and every child but my son got the trifecta of awards. Perfect Attendance, Perfect Homework, and Excellent Behavior. Really, every other child in the class was perfect? Now, I don't think my son was perfect, but every other child was perfect? I don't think so. I have never seen such a situation. I think there is something wrong with a teacher who can't see that only one child isn't perfect - it was bizarre.
After the kids got their awards one child was trying to take away my son's award. I watched as my son refused to give the child his award, apparently he had figured out the other child was planning to throw his award. I walked away after that, thinking he was handling this so well. I needed to check in with another mother and he was doing great. Well, a few minutes later the teacher approached me and told me that my son had convinced another child to give him his award (a pin that was to go on the child's sweater) and he had thrown it. She told me "It's too bad he had to ruin the whole day". Really, he ruined the whole day? What he did sucked and wasn't okay, but had he really ruined the whole day? The pin was located and returned to the other child, my son apologized, and the "whole day" was "ruined".
Later that day I asked my son if there was anyone at school who was mean to him. He immediately named the child who was trying to take his pin. He said "______ is mean to me every day, every day." Apparently no one had bothered to ask him what had happened, and even if they had he would have had trouble explaining his side, and even if he had the teacher had determined that he was the trouble and all the other students were perfect, never having teased or taunting my son, so there was no reason for him to share what had happened, he'd already been judged and found guilty.
No comments:
Post a Comment