Adaptations- who are they for?

I have been really busy with my work with SelfDesign, and I have had a steady stream of "in person" learners as well as internet learners. This post is going to be SCREECH... I have encountered some issues around the learners I'm seeing in person that are making me crazy... it's time to get it off my chest.

First... I have been working with a family from another province since the end of August. It's a little girl with fairly significant phonological processing problems.
She may or may not have ADHD but she does have difficulty staying focused. There could be different reasons for this so I can't say- but regardless this precious little girl has to work really hard to learn. Hannah was in French Immersion for the first two years of her education, so she hasn't had any formal English instruction, however, her difficulties would have been just as obvious in the French Language. In the Fall she was transferring to a new school and to English Instruction. The parents had a meeting in August with the principal and shared their concerns about their daughter and told the principal about the reading clinic.

Hannah came to BC for a few weeks holiday in August, and during that time I started the program with her and did a full week "in person". We continued online from her home after that. When we started she was virtually a non reader, and she required alot of hands-on refocusing and direction.

When the family left to go back home, I suggested that her new school contact me if they had any questions about what we were doing- and they did.
I was speaking to her new classroom teacher, so I explained a little about what I do and then asked what they had in place for Hannah. I was stunned by her response. She said, "Oh, we don't do special education here." I was sure I misheard her but she said it again. When I suggested that the law requires it, she said, well we have it but "she" is too busy to see kids and does mostly testing. !!!
I asked if she knew anything about Hannah, and she said she didn't really but did notice Hannah was not reading. I filled her in on what I found during testing and how Hannah responded to the clinic and from that moment on the teacher seemed to be convinced that Hannah was in the wrong class. She said she couldn't do anything for her. She thought their special class would be better- it had a small number of kids in it and Hannah would feel less pressure there. I asked what the other kids were like in there and she "assured" me that Hannah would be OK and that none of those kids could read well at all, and that many had significant developmental delays. I made sure she knew that Hannah could learn in a regular class but needed some sort of support as she was coming out of French Immersion and also that she needed intensive phonemic awareness training. She needed an adapted program, not a modified one, and the most important thing was that she needed to keep receiving intensive instruction in phonemic awareness. The classroom teacher, who is retiring next year, said that she didn't know what that was (Oh please- she teaches reading to grade 2s!) but that she thought the special ed teacher might.

A week later Hannah told me she had a new teacher. In speaking to the mother after our online lesson, she told me that they moved Hannah to a room with only 9 students.
Sigh- not what I wanted to hear. However, Hannah seems happy and her mother was just glad that the pressure was lifted for the time being. This new teacher seems to know what phonemic awareness is, but the other kids in the class are quite challenged.
I am worried about Hannah's self esteem. The bottom line, in this situation, the family has to go outside the school to get Hannah's needs met.


The second thing that made me screech lately is the plight of a boy named Jeremy. He has been coming to see me since he was 11 and he is now 15. He is a tall handsome boy who is very athletic and has a good self image. He also has a very stubborn written output and expressive language problem. He is dyslexic too, but he has worked really hard over the past four years and has improved his reading ability quite a bit. While he is far from a fluent reader, he can decode and apply strategies to unfamiliar words.

Jeremy came back to see me because he was worried about his English class. He said that there was going to be a big writing component and he was pretty sure he would not be able to keeping up. I asked him if he had ever used Dragon Naturallyspeaking or MacSpeech Dictate, which are both speech recognition software programs. He said no.
I would have thought that was one adaptation that most high schools would put in place right away because here in BC, high schools do not do much, if any, direct instruction anymore. It's a pretty simple yet direct way to help kids like Jeremy. I spent a week teaching him how to use it and then set up small writing assignments for him to do. He caught on right away, but more importantly- he was stoked. He was excited about it! His mother remarked at the beginning of the second session, that Jeremy had never showed this much excitement about any thing school related.

It wasn't just that the program was cool to use, which it is- it was more that he seemed to have a renewed sense of hope. Jeremy could see that with this working for him, he would finally be able to do what all his classmates could do- and he could do it for himself.

In the span of one week Jeremy wrote four 1/2 page paragraphs and one full page essay that he wrote by reading and synthesizing two different articles. He did it willingly- happily actually. He kept saying that it would have taken him three times as long to do these and he would have hated it. I have seen his spontaneous writing and believe me when I say that for him to read an article, organized his thoughts so he could retell it, and then write 1/2 a page and edit it in 45 minutes for him is astounding.

His mother was convinced, and sent a note to the learning assistance teacher at his high school asking if he could use Dragon Naturallyspeaking in the resource room there to do his assignments, and she wrote about the difference they believed it would make for him. It was surprising that an email came back saying that no, they couldn't accommodate him. They don't use it for kids like Jeremy- they use it for kids with physical problems, like amputees and kids in wheel chairs.

So now I'm screeching like a banshee... SR software is an adaptation- and adaptations are appropriate for kids like Jeremy...
What's wrong with those people!!!