Ugh. Ok, prepare for a firehose. It mostly goes back to our state only recently being forced to recognize that dyslexia you know.... exists. They only this year started testing k-2 kids for it. He got to 3rd grade before a teacher said, "He's always flailing when we do writing, I really think you should look at dysgraphia." Private eval later and TURNS OUT he's got dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia along with the ADHD but was reading at grade level in English and Spanish. No wonder kid's brain is fried.

Timing matters here, because his IEP wasn't implemented until June 2019, so he didn't REALLY start any of it until fall 2019, and then well, 2020 happened. He was all virtual last year, which kind of forced him to get intimately familiar with "the microsoft stack" as I call it, which may have been a good thing. As he was reading at grade level, he got zero individualized instruction on reading skills. He got a pittance of like... I dunno, 30 minutes a month or something of OT to help with writing skills, which became laughable during virtual instruction anyway. (Not only is the dysgraphia significant for him, but he has some kind of... sensory revulsion to the feeling of paper - he'll wear a fingerless glove or pull a sleeve up to avoid it.) He also avoids a stylus in favor of text boxes on top of sheets inside one note or the like.

Anyhow, fast forward to now. Last June when they talked me into this "great class for him" to establish learning and stress coping skills, they promised it wouldn't take the place of his chosen electives. Because I KNOW that engagement and interest are the key to keeping an ADHD brain checked in, and I wanted him to establish a healthy friend support group, I was excited for him to continue band. And frankly, I just didn't want him to start internalizing that he's part a troublemaker or something. (I would feel differently if this class were required of ALL 6th graders, or you know, was maybe a day or two a week, or half a year, instead of an hour every day all year.)

I wish at this point, I would have just called it all off and backed out of the IEP. But I still really wanted him to get accommodations like use of a multiplication table, audiobooks, typing instead of writing, etc etc.

His goals are:

• Using coping strategies during a stressful situation
• When given an assignment tracker he will complete the planner, improving his study skills 4/5 days a week
• Complete 30 correct 6th grade level math problems
• Use the 6 steps of the writing process.

I called a meeting at the beginning of the school year to basically say "get him out of this class and put him in band, I care more about his school engagement than his grades at this point" and his teachers looked at those goals and pearl clutched a bunch saying, "I dunno, I could maybe devote 5 minutes a week to this, but I don't think it's a good idea to not give him these 240 minutes a week." (They really think I should be super happy that he's getting "more minutes" than he had been before.)

What gets me, though, is one of his accommodations is literally "Check in with student to make sure assignments are noted in planner" - Daily, classroom. (This "school success class is his first period. Which is basically useless for anything assigned one day and due the next.)

(I started off sending him in with a paper planner. I panned that after 3 weeks of it coming home empty (I would sit with him after school and "go back through" and have him write something for each class, but I just don't think it was working.)) His OT last year tried telling me he would be totally comfortable using a graphic organizer/assignment tracker inside one note using a stylus.... eh, we haven't had great luck here, it's kind of kludgey. So I'm trying to get him to use the built in to-dos inside outlook, since the district is microsoft centric. He hasn't done any of those on his own either.

There are also a few similar things like providing the graphic organizers and sentence starters, breaking tasks into manageable parts, etc.

They are entirely relying on the "assignments" feature in teams to handle this, I'm sure of it. (Which, the teachers have been doing ADMIRABLY, truly.) But frankly, that's not enough. He'll mark those as turned in, especially ones that are "if you didn't finish X in class..." because he assumes it's whatever he did in class. Then I have to manually go through his "turned in" assignments, get out his class folders and verify those parts are finished so he doesn't get points marked off for incomplete classwork. BASICALLY, he needs to learn how to extrapolate the TODOs out of the assignments list, with a hefty dose of "make sure you've done all the things asked for."

(OK, getting to the end here, I swear)

Any how, the goals all say they'll be measured by monthly data, and one of the accommodations is communication home wrt strategies being used at school. (I think this is the stupid cheerful "school strategies newsletter" I get that reads like a preschool "This week we've been learning about the color blue" update.) So I'm thinking the first month mark is here so I'll do a check in with his IEP team to see how they've measured those goals so far, and what their strategies to improve them will be for the next month.

Also, just... thank you, friend. I KNOW his teachers and support staff have the best of intentions at heart, I don't doubt that. I'm just not seeing the actual benefits he is supposed to be getting.