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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP here - thanks for all the responses! I don't want to say my specific district for privacy, but we live in the Shenandoah Valley.

His school uses UFLI.  I found a tutor and she is really nice, but can only come once a week and it is expensive.  My parents have been assisting us with the cost of tutoring, but it is really insufficient.  I have a ton of resources at my home to practice with him, lots of decodable books, magnetic dry erase board with magnetic letters, ect. and I am creating a new reading reward chart with what I am calling "book bucks" and "activity bucks" that he can choose and can be used for him to pick  buy a new book of his choosing or an activity of his choosing.  The problem is that he also has ADHD and is truly exhausted and just wants to rest and play when he gets home (which I understand).  I am only asking him to work with us 10-15 minutes a day, but that is a HUGE struggle and he is super resistant.  He takes medication (which is working great for him) and truly gives 100% each day in school and so requesting MORE from him results in huge meltdowns.  I'm hoping our new visual reward system with physical printed out "book bucks/activity bucks" and earning things he wants and mixing in some fun decodables (pete the cat) will help.

I am going to explore what it would look like to get more intensive tutoring support at least 3x a week.  My parents will help; my mother is a retired educator who did a lot of work with literacy. She helps where she can and did A LOT of work with my son over winter break, but she is getting to be elderly, has been out of the field for at least 15 years now (though she tutors and volunteers in northern va still) and cannot provide the daily intervention that he needs.  We have tried weekly virtual support, but she is not tech saavy and it has not been real productive :(

I feel so dejected and this feels so deeply unfair to my child (and to others who have less knowledge and resources).  Professionally, my work overlaps with my child's school and THAT has put me in an even more uncomfortable position.  ANYONE who knows me, knows how passionate I am about our students, families, and broader community, and how much I value equity and social justice. I do my best to advocate for the families I work with and so for anyone in his school to think I would do anything less than that, is shocking.  I expect better.  I have done my best to maintain boundaries, so I have NOT gone directly to the sped director or school board members, but I can if I need to, I just don't want to go that route if I can avoid it.  I will also share that MY experiences with my own children has definitely provided me even stronger insight on how to support other students AND their caregivers.  I don't think I've really ever struggled to emphathize with families (that is a strength of mine) but has been helpful to help me be a better advocate.  I don't want to say my exact role, since that would probably make it easy for me to be identified and this is publically searchable, but yeah, this has been.an.experience. [/quote]

Your child has brain differences that make rewards very difficult to implement. My ADHD/ASD son with dyscalculia and low processing speed couldn't work towards rewards. It was actually cruel to dangle them in front of him.

You don't say whether you've confirmed dyslexia or not. This is key, because it will determine what type of reading support you give him. At this point, OP, he'd be better off not going to school and learning to read with a dyslexia tutor every day (if he's dyslexic), than getting exhausted at school and then being able to work with any tutor. However that works only if someone can stay home with him: your mother, perhaps? If you and your mother are in the education field, can one of you train as an Orton-Gillingham tutor, or at least get enough exposure so that you feel you can teach your son? It will cut down on costs down the road, because of course you need to hire one right away regardless. When my son was little and needed physical and occupation therapies, I would observe them all and then practice with him all the things they'd done on the days they weren't coming. They gave me manipulatives for me to use with him at home. Same for the speech therapist he had. We were his therapists for 6 days of the week. In elementary, he would come home from school exhausted, but I still re-taught all the concepts he had missed in school. We spent 6 years like this, and by middle school he was all caught up and started performing above his grade level, which made me so happy. He took 12 AP classes in high school and is attending a decent college.

Finally, your last paragraph is a whole lot of nonsense. This isn't about you, your professional integrity, equity or social justice, or who you know. The school cannot help you. If you complain to the higher-ups, you might get more services... but are they going to be the right ones to help your child? If he has dyslexia, I can assure you they won't help. Dyslexia is the learning disability that schools treat the worse, because they refuse to implement phonetic instruction in reading. I know it's crazy, but that's how it is. You need to pay for private services.
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