School thinks DS has ASD, dev ped does not agree. Now what?
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Anonymous
The developmental pediatrician who follows a kid through adulthood is not unwell. Leave the diagnosing to the developmental pediatrician and other professionals - you should stick to teaching which is the job you were trained for and hired to do. |
Anonymous
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Again oddly obsessed PP. the school is following their protocol for switching from a 504 to an IEP.
Please find someone to talk to. Paranoia isn't healthy. |
Anonymous
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A dev pediatrician who sees your child once a year or twice a year for an hour gets different kind of information from a teacher who has your child in class every day. Notice I say different, not more or better or less or worse.
Teachers aren't usually trained to spot autism but developmental pediatricians do not see your child interact with other children and usually do not see your children in "natural" settings. When doctors and therapists meet my DS in the clinic they think he is engaging, articulate, mature, and focused. Several therapists who have worked with DS weekly even question whether he should have any diagnosis at all because he is so consistently well-behaved. When this happens we point to the teacher report. In class he is hyper and sometimes can't get a lick of work down to save his life. Dev. pediatricians rely on teacher and parent reports to make diagnoses and recommendations. There are ignorant teachers and teachers with biases, but you can't discount them blindly. If I were OP I would take the checklist the teacher produced to a new developmental pediatrician or neuropsychologist to try to get more recommendations about what evaluations to do next. |
Anonymous
Sorry, I think that it was CARS checklists that I used to see teachers following kids around with at my daughter's school. Photocopied autism checklists when honestly I'm pretty sure these teachers had never seen an autistic kid in their life were filling out. This is CARS-2 but there was a first/original CARS too. http://www.proedinc.com/customer/productView.aspx?ID=4754 |
Anonymous
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I'm pretty sure every teacher has seen a kid with autism. It's now one out of every 68 kids who are diagnosed.
It's not a check list that tells you if a child has autism. It tells you if the child has difficulty in certain areas and the more of them you check the more of a red flag it is and the more the school will recommend further screening. I don't know of any school district that makes placement or IEP coding recommendations based on one test. Do they? |
Anonymous
I've seen private, mostly oversubscribed catholic schools, have teachers perform various evaluations of children using 'checklists' or crude evaluation methods to assess children - mostly with the endgame of pressuring parents to medicate the child (mostly boys) or to counsel them out of the school so that the child's needs could be 'met elsewhere'. In every case a smaller class size and better and more creative teaching methods could have meant that all of these children could have functioned fine at those schools but that was not what they did. None of these kids was seriously disabled and virtually none of them had anything close to ASD and no - these teachers had not seen a real ASD kid much less a classroom of them in their lives. If teachers are going to evaluate kids they should get some training first - some weeks in a Kennedy Krieger clinic, acsemester in various special ed classrooms. Or - maybe they could leave the diagnosing up to those that have dedicated their lives to that and just focus on teaching the children in their classrooms. |
Anonymous
No they don't. The GARS checklist in the op's case is the first step in documenting moving from a 504 to an IEP. There are a few similar screening checklists or questionnaire type tools that the schools use. Most of them have autism in the name. The schools don't have to be thorough. They're not diagnosing anyone your kid they are documenting the need for services following a legal framework with what is available to them. Schools don't do the ADOS, and for all the parents are railing against it, it is much more reliable, specific, and sensitive than any of the screening tools that the schools use. So to review, parents it is possible to get an IEP under Ohi for ADHD. It is a lot harder to do so if your child has other confounding behaviors or LDs. Include the ADOS as part of your neuropsych for the sake of thoroughness if you care what your IEP label says. Keep in mind it may not change the school's choice of what they think is accurate. Yes, you can follow formal challenge routes. You can hire lawyers or IEP consultants and still be facing the same situation. So instead of obsessing about the label, focus on getting appropriate services, which regardless is a huge challenge unto itself. |
Anonymous
| You sound like you don't understand basic math. The average class size in public schools is usually about 20-30 for elementary. For MS and HS teaching multiple sections a day it would be mathematically improbable for a teacher to NOT have a child with autism in one of the classes. |
Anonymous
The checklists are not designed for clinicians. They are designed for laypeople, like teachers. You are really getting tiresome. |
Anonymous
Out developmental ped reads questions for me and child, that is what these tests are. He does not talk to the therapists or teachers. It really varies. |
Anonymous
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I haven't read this thread. We had a similar issue when DS was in K. He hated school that year often saying his teacher was mean. He also takes some time to warm up and took a long time to make friends. We had him evualated and he was found to be borderline ADHD and the recommendation was not to treat him at that time, just to keep our eyes on him. DCUM all weighed in that DS sounded like he was on the spectrum and he must have issues if the school was telling us so.
We requested a certain teacher for 1st grade who is very patient, loving and kind. DS flouished in her class, hasn't had any issues since and has made many friends. |
Anonymous
Just to expand, the actual CARS scoring tests can only be scored by a clinician who has been trained and observes the child in person. The tested is calibrated and each item has definite criteria. There are CARS checklists for teachers and parents, but those only inform the clinician. The actual test has to be done by someone who is trained. My son had the original CARS twice, once by someone the school brought in to do behind our back, and the second by Dr. Stephen Camarata of Vanderbilt; the scores were within a half-point of each other in the non-autistic range. Dr. Camarata didn't see the first result before he did his CARS assessment; that's how controlled the process is, scoring wise. https://www.chadis.com/site/content/childhood-autism-rating-scale-second-edition-cars2-hf The Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS) helps to identify children (2 years and older with Autism, specifically, distinguishing them from developmentally handicapped children who are not Autistic. In addition, it distinguishes between mid-to-moderate and severe Autism. Its brevity makes it a very useful tool to help recognize and classify Autistic children. The CARS was developed over a 15-year period with more than 1,500 cases, the CARS includes items drawn from five prominent systems for diagnosing Autism, and provides quantifiable ratings based on direct behavior observation. Each item covers a particular characteristic, ability of behavior. Note that this is a strictly a clinician rating tool and is not to be administered directly to parents but can be used in conjunction with the CARS parent questionnaire (QPC) which is an unscored data collection tool. CHADIS, with guidance from the authors, has created a way for relevant parent data for each CARS item to be viewed above each clinician item. This should greatly facilitate the clinical process when meeting with parent and child. |
Anonymous
We didn't request a specific teacher as we don't know them but said our child would do best with XXX teacher and its a much better situation than last year. A teacher/classroom can make a huge difference. |
Anonymous
How much time do you think a teacher spends with one child per day with 20-30 kids per classroom or more? It actually is possible. Our school dumps all kids with any IEP in one classroom regardless of the issue. We had to fight to get out of the classroom as it was not a good fit. My child is the only child according to the school with an IEP in the classroom. |
Anonymous
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http://bestpracticeautism.blogspot.com/2012/01/best-practice-review-autism-diagnostic.html
The role of the ADOS in the assessment of ASD in school and community settings has received attention as well. The perceived advantages and disadvantages of the ADOS were examined via a national survey of practicing school and clinical psychologists (Akshoomoff, Corsello, & Schmidt, 2006). Perceived advantages of the ADOS included its strength in capturing ASD-specific behaviors and the standardized structure provided for observation, while diagnostic discrimination and required resources were the most commonly identified disadvantages. Respondents listing advantages of the ADOS indicated that it captured ASD behaviors, both generally and specifically, and that it was a good measure for identifying behaviors that are difficult to observe or probe in other situations. Respondents indicated that a disadvantage of the ADOS is that it tends to over classify other diagnostic groups as ASD and does not discriminate well within ASD subgroups. Of those that indicated resources as a disadvantage, nearly all indicated time of administration as a disadvantage. |