Time, Money and Policy

I am sitting at my desk this morning feeling a bit paralyzed. In August, my 5 year old son went through an evaluation of his developmental skills –as all other children entering kindergarten do. We brought him in for his evaluation totally confident –as far as his father and I were concerned, he was very advanced for his age both in his physical and emotional development. Our child knew his letters and could put together a puzzle meant for an older child. Our child played with tiny legos that required more concentration than most 5 year olds are able to yield. Clearly Max did not need special services. Or so we thought.

In November we received the results of Max’s evaluation from August and were very surprised to learn that he had scored below average on fine motor skill development.We requested a meeting with his classroom teacher to discuss the findings and came away with little more than a report and a promise that we would receive information from the SPED (Special Education) department. We also received a permission slip of sorts that granted the school the ability to do further evaluation and testing. At the end of December we called the school to find out what the status of his latest assessment was.We heard nothing –until we received an official letter in the mail inviting us to a meeting to discuss Special Education Services in February.

Now, February has come –the meeting is around the corner- and as we understand it, Max will begin one on one occupational therapy through the end of the school year. While I am grateful that he will receive these services, I am appalled at how long it has taken to assess and start his therapy. Here we are in February waiting for day one of his occupational therapy (OT) while he was identified in August as having some issues –a third of the school year is gone! I have a friend is an OT who works for another school district who told me that I should consider myself lucky he’s getting the services at all.

As a fundraiser for the UW, I like to talk to donors about the work we are doing in school readiness. I explain that we are working with early childhood education providers to help them obtain the skills they need to identify kids early on with social or developmental issues. The idea is that kids need to have basic building blocks to succeed in school and the sooner we ID issues, the sooner they can get the help they need to be successful.

Being a parent of a child whose “issues” were identified shortly before the start of kindergarten, and by the public school district where my child attends school, I see that identification is only half the problem. If there is an issue with expediency between identifying and servicing due to lack of funding/staffing/bureaucracy, the efforts of early identification have less/no impact. In short, if there isn’t a direct line between identification and service many students fall through the cracks. While we shouldn’t give up on the early identification process, I believe we need to spend the same amount of time, pursuing monies and policy change to ensure that the child receives services on the other end. It seems clear to me that those efforts go hand in hand and one without the other renders itself moot.

Upon further research into other school districts I found that the wait time my family had experienced was on par with others. And in fact, I am lucky that my son will receive services. His evaluation found him to be just below average in 2 categories of development and average and above average in 3 others. This makes him less of a risk than other students of failure and without services, chances are, he would dislike the efforts of school but could probably squeak by. Squeaking by is not an option. I want him to enjoy learning and not feel burdened by it.My desire is for my son to excel at his studies, not simply maintain the status quo. And without the help of the school’s OT, his teacher and his family this may not become a reality for him.