The school district results are back. Jared is classified in the normal range for their entire battery of tests. He's not borderline. He's completely within range. The therapist also said that he's brilliant and actually above his current grade level in the public school. His hearing and vision are fine. His auditory comprehension, expressive communication and total language scores are good. His receptive and expressive one word vocabulary skills are well within appropriate range. There's no sign of autism, ADD, ADHD, mental retardation, emotional disturbance, etc. If he was in public school, the staff feels he would be excelling. After the past months of hearing all the poor results and bad news, it was nice to hear all these positive things!
As I mentioned previously, I asked her to test his auditory function. She found a test... miles and miles away in the same school district. It's the only one in the entire county and she really doesn't like it. In fact she repeatedly said, "I don't like this test" and "Even really smart people would fail at this test" and "I know honor students in higher grade levels that wouldn't even get this information correct" and other statements like this. She said she only did this test because I asked her to administer it. Here are the results:
Scaled scores from 7 - 13 are within the average range
Auditory # Memory Forward - 6 (the therapist said that she would get them all wrong too and that this one was way too hard. I was actually surprised he got so close to average.)
Auditory # Memory Reversed - 6 (she gave him a list of numbers and he had to repeat them forward and reversed. Again, she went on and on about how she didn't know a single first grader or kindergartner who could do this.)
Auditory Sentence Memory - 7
Auditory Word Memory - 7
Auditory Interpretations of Directions - 7
Auditory Word Discrimination - 1 (she would say 2 words that sound very similar and he would have to say if they were the same or different.)
Auditory Processing (thinking & reasoning) - 7
Because of the 1 mentioned in the word discrimination, his auditory perceptual quotient indicates a significant delay. The therapist said, "If I would have just left off the really hard word discrimination test, he would not have been classified with 'significant delay'". Can you tell how kind she is? She is sooooo nice and she really enjoys Jared. I suspect that she may have made things a little easy on Jared because she's so nice, and, as she mentioned a lot, she didn't like this test.
After we went through the evaluation, I had to meet with the Admission, Review, and Dismissal (ARD) Committee to see how to move forward. There was actually no box on the standardized form to check for Jared's disability. The therapist checked "receptive", while telling me, "It's really not receptive, but we don't have any other boxes to check." So, if Jared was to attend school there, he would be in speech therapy, 30 minutes/1 day per week for 7 weeks. During that speech therapy, they would work with him on rhyming words, placing things in categories, and recalling information needed to complete tasks.
Today showed me a number of things. 1) APD really seems to be a "new thing" in the US and there are so many uncertainties in the school system (at least in mine). 2) It can definitely be an "invisible" disability. The child may act normal and test within normal range. The therapist really didn't even want to do the test and she didn't really agree with the results, but had to administer it and report it because I asked her. 3) This confirms the theory that children learn to cope with, or even mask APD until they are in 2nd or 3rd grade (or older), while it may mimic many other learning disabilities. 4) There are many wonderful, thoughtful, caring staff members at that school and they were willing to check into testing Jared with a test that's never even been used at the school. How great is that?
I'm thankful for all the individuals who have helped us in this journey. Even though the public school doesn't have the resources to truly assist Jared with his neurological disability, they were willing to meet with him multiple times, because his parents felt that something wasn't right.
We love because he first loved us. 1 John 4:19 (NIV)
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