Tyra has been struggling in school for a really long time. Almost since she started I remember being concerned that she just wasn’t getting it. She has difficulty with both reading and math and because every other subject revolves around those ones she just struggles in everything. I remember expressing concern to Mrs Spaulding, her kindergarten teacher, and being told “Oh, Tyra can read.” But as soon as Tyra got home she couldn’t, or at least that was what Tyra must have wanted me to think. Last year, in second grade, she was put into a reading tutoring program called double dosing. She would stay after school a couple days a week and get extra practice with reading. But at the end of last year, when she was filling out a packet that was supposed to be a review of the whole year, and she couldn’t do any of it, I felt like maybe she should repeat second grade. Her teacher, Mrs Gustafson, told me that they “really REALLY don’t like doing that” and she said that Tyra would be fine, and they went ahead and moved her up to third grade. This year started with their regular evaluations in the fall, and her teacher, Mrs Nelson, told me that she is a year behind in her level of reading, to which I am of course thinking, “see, I knew we should have had her repeat second grade!” Kyle and I thought that maybe we should have Tyra evaluated to be sure that there wasn’t something more serious going on. Sometimes we would wonder if her difficulties in school were somehow linked to her bed wetting issue. We also kicked around the idea that maybe her near drowning accident might have caused deeper damage than we had thought. So we asked her teacher how we can go about having her evaluated. First we were required to wait for her teacher to go through six weeks of interventions with her. This was a period of time where her teacher would pull her aside during class and help her work on practicing reading, but they weren’t just reading books. Mrs Nelson has a big book of columns, and Tyra would have to read down the columns as quickly as she could without messing up. The first columns were just a couple of letters put together and Tyra would just have to read the sounds, and as soon as she could do it in under the specified time, she could move on to the next set.
After the interventions period, Mrs Nelson had to recommend Tyra for further evaluation, and then we had to wait a few more weeks before that could begin. In the meantime, someone had recommended that I ask the school psychologist to observe her in her classroom, and when I asked if this could be done I got an email from the school psychologist asking me what she is supposed to be observing Tyra FOR? I didn’t know how to answer that. Tyra obviously is having some problems, and I am not there to see why, and her teacher is busy with all of the students in her class, so she can’t really sit there and pay attention to just Tyra. I was told that observing the child is just something the school psychologist is supposed to do, I don’t know how they are supposed to be doing their job! Finally in mid November I heard from a resource teacher at the school about filling out some paperwork so that they can begin an evaluation. Of course by that point school had already been in session for nearly three months and was therefore a third of the way through. Kyle and I got the paperwork filled out one night and got it sent back to the school and they were able to begin testing. The testing took several weeks to complete, and with the holidays in there, there were several non-school days so that felt like it slowed the testing down a bit.
Here we are mid February now, and we had our conference to discuss the evaluation results today! They went over the answers that Kyle and I had put down on a survey that was part of the paperwork and showed us how that score made it look like Tyra was having serious problems (and that really was how it looked to us: she really seemed to be having serious problems), and Mrs Nelson’s answers for the same questions, had a score that made it look like there was some concern but nothing nearly as big as the concern that Kyle and I were having. So then they talked about the things that the school psychologist had noticed. She sat in the class to watch Tyra and saw that Mrs Nelson would instruct the class on the topics for the day, and then she would sit down and instruct Tyra. Also they told us about how they tested Tyra and they told us that basically what it boils down to is Tyra just has a focus problem, and they did not find any learning disabilities. Based on the testing it showed that Tyra would get several math problems in a row correct, but then every math problem after that wrong because she lost interest and just wanted to be done with it. Same thing with reading; she would read a bit and then start making things up because she was impatient and just wanted to be finished! So based on that, they found that she does have all the tools she needs to figure things out. When she stops long enough to think things through she CAN and DOES figure them out, but she would rather be doing something else and so tries to get out of it as quickly as she can.
I am glad that there is no underlying problem. Focus is something that can be worked on. I’ve heard that using a timer is a great tool in teaching someone to focus, so we will have to give that one a try. Of course I do kind of feel like this year has been a bit of a waste. I thought last year that she should repeat second grade, and so far all this year she doesn’t seem to be improving and here we are six months into the school year, and we finally have the results from the evaluations. School gets out in about three months from now. But at least now we know that it’s just that she needs to practice focusing, and now we get to decide how we are going to do that.