If you have an HFA middle schooler, how are they doing? What accommodations have been useful?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kid has anxiety/ADHD/ASD/LD so there is a lot going on and our experience might not applicable to you.

Before the school year, we went to every open house, every tour, etc. We requested his schedule a couple of days early, had a meeting with the counselor and assistant principal who took us on another tour when we walked through his classrooms and made sure he knew exactly where to go. We also wrote a long introductory email for all his teachers and tried to establish relationships with all of them.

In terms of accommodations and services, he’s in a social skills homeroom and an executive skills class. The rest of his classes are cotaught. He has a flash pass for the counselor’s office, which is especially good when dealing with sensory overload. That is in addition to the usual testing accommodations and the ones for learning disabilities.

The transition has gone far smoother than I thought it would, although there have been ups and downs. Socially, I am not sure how things are going. He has kids he talks to, but not friends he does stuff with outside of school. He’s seemingly content with the social side, so we don’t push.

I like this doing a tour to know where every rooms are & possibly meeting teachers in advance to communicate before day 1 of middle school year. Is that part of IEP plan of 5th grade going to 6th grade? We are in MCPS as well.

We didn’t write a tour into the IEP because it was a one time thing, although we did discuss it with the middle school staff at the transition meeting. We reached out in the summer , a few weeks before school restarted.