Please help!! School does not want to provide 504 high tech accommodations for dysgraphia-help with counter arguments?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Honestly it doesn’t sound like you have much of a case. My DS gets to type due to poor fine motor skills and produces 2-3x as much typing. He is also going to take more time to learn to touch-type so he needs the extra practice. If the school did not see much of a difference in handwritten v typing, I’m not really seeing the point in expending energy on this.

NP. As you pointed out, the child needs time to learn to type. It makes sense to start doing that NOW. Did your child produce 2-3x more before learning to type? Mine did not! He is severely dysgraphic and we were a low tech family so he didn't have experience. But writing by hand never worked for him and got increasingly worse, despite all of our best efforts.

I am sorry, OP. I used TTRS a few minutes a day with my son for YEARS. I highly recommend. It is a program for dyslexics (my son is not dyslexic) but it was perfect.

Also, we pulled our son from FCPS and homeschooled. I don't think FCPS had any idea how to help him.

Yes, my child instantly started producing more when he could type.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DC has a 504..she has a neuropsych from children's 2 years ago but it didn't have ed testing and only a brief IQ test. I actually had a lawyer at the meeting with me today. She said wait for another year or 2 to do neuropsych...school is pretty aligned against us.

You never said what writing program the school uses. If it is Lucy Calkins, so many students will not be spelling correctly or writing well. So, in comparison your child seems fine. I posted a couple of times earlier saying don't waste money on advocates or lawyers. It is better to just spend the money on tutors, keyboarding classes/programs, teaching yourself a program like Noteability so you can teacher your child how to use it, and then taking pictures of worksheets yourself and uploading them into Noteability to use with an iPad and stylus.

Even if you got the most amazing IEP, schools in general due an AWFUL job with dysgraphia.

I don't even think they have a writing curriculum...it's Mcps. I wanted them to let me scan in worksheets or have them do it...but the best we could get was she can type her answer online with better word prediction software/spell check.

Why in the world would you want word prediction and spell check? Are you consulting with experts on this?

DP. Word prediction and spell check is what our neuropsych and SLP recommended once DS could at least get the first couple letters of what he wanted to spell correct or close enough to trigger useful predictive suggestions.

Why? Because writing tests different things. If you assign an essay to check comprehension of a novel, then spelling is getting in the way of demonstrating understanding.

Kids who have difficulty with physically producing handwriting or with producing writing with age appropriate spelling, grammar and punctuation need accommodations for those problems (which are developmentally behind age/grade because of disability) so they can access other parts of instruction which are geared toward teaching kids to articulate and develop their ideas according to various conventions or to assessing kids understanding.

I think this is a very bad idea for an accomodation and focuses way too much on assessments. You need this kid to learn to write. Spellcheck and predictive text will be crippling. She’s in 3rd grade and needs to learn the basics, no matter how slowly that goes. Just “producing” a lot of words spelled correctly is not the point. For older kids who need to produce long essays and reports, it’s more appropriate.

A lot of the recommendations on things like this are canned and don’t actually relate to what the particular child needs, and are thrown in as a laundry list. Like my child’s IEP and neuropsych list things like speech-to-text but that’s generally totally inapplicable to him. If I found out they were letting him dictate writing in class instead of (painstakingly) supporting him writing, I would be quite mad.