Tuesday, May 06, 2008

The meeting didn't go well. They do not understand and I am afraid the more I explain the less likely they will get it and the more likely they will accuse me of something. We agreed to retain Michael in 1st grade, they think he will magically start keeping up. I know he will not. He has progressed in the last 2 years but he is still on Kindergarten levels. They want to retain him and just drop all his Special Ed services and just keep an eye on him. I tried to explain that 4 of the 6 do not retain anything they learn. They struggle with reading even after they start to read, they never seem to catch up. They don't learn at the pace that most children learn at. I tried to give them kudos and support but I just don't believe they will understand until next year. His teacher actually said, "He should be fine b/c he was here for the entire time reading segment and understands it. He just needs to be here for the full year." Like the other teachers he has had didn't try hard enough. Maybe it is me, I don't try hard enough.

I'll be back later after the other meetings.

3 comments:

Lisa said...

Grrrrr!!!! You want me to come down and open a can of whoopass on them??????

Torina said...

School sucks, doesn't it? It is no wonder some kids drop out. I hate it when the teachers make it seem like you just don't believe in your kid. Tara's last school did that to me. Like mainstreaming a kid and just repeating everything they did a year ago is going to do jack. It will be starting over from scratch for the little guy. I feel for you. It is so hard to deal with morons. Have you contacted PACER? They might be able to hook you up with some local advocates. Once you start bringing in other big guns, the peeps start taking things a little more seriously.

Abby said...

Just a note about the reading thing, did I already comment to you about using closed captioning on your tv to help with reading fluency? It's a quick no-pressure trick that I figured out several years ago when a kid I babysat for all of a sudden showed off that he could read on his 5th birthday (without any prior direct teaching).

I'm sure it wouldn't "fix" everything, but it might help a tiny bit with a few of the kids because it's IMPOSSIBLE to watch tv without following along with the words on the bottom of the screen. =)