How to Work with Schools: Step 5 ADHD

After you have taken a look at health issues that could make your child appear inattentive or hyperactive you need to find out whether or not your child has a learning disability. Children who are doing poorly academically may eventually tune the teacher out. If a student does not understand the lesson he/she will not pay attention and appear distracted. The school should help you determine whether or not your child has a learning disability or if the problem is related to ADHD.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. 
    

   Your teacher may wait for the parent teacher conference meeting or you may request to meet with your child's teacher at other times. You should ask how your child is doing academically. Find out in what areas your child is having problems. Has your child had these same problems over a long period of time? If so, perhaps your child has some type of learning disability.

2. Ask that your child be tested to see if there is a learning disability. The school will not necessarily like this request since it takes time and money to do these assessments and if the school did not recommend it already they may not think you know what you are talking about. You must be firm about requesting the assessment. By law the school must do the assessment. At this time the school may call a meeting to discuss this request. The meeting is sometimes a Student Study Team meeting (SST) or Student Success Team, etc. There will be representatives from speech, psychology, education, administration and sometimes health and other disciplines. This is NOT the same as the IEP (Individualized Educational Plan) and does not begin the special education timeline. This is a problem solving meeting that makes plans or attempts to assist the student and family with success in school.

3. 
    

   The school will check to see if all processing (visual, auditory and kinesthetic) paths are intact and do other testing to see what level your child is function at in school. They will have your child's hearing and vision tested (if you can't hear you may look inattentive!). It takes time for this testing, but it must be done in a timely manner and you can ask the case worker what that timeline is so you can keep track of it.
   The school nurse should take a complete health and developmental (H&D) history. It is amazing how important this activity is. Many items on the H&D may be important for properly assessing your child.

Tips & Warnings

• Children learn through visual, auditory and kinesthetic methods. If they have deficits in any one of these areas they may be able to compensate with the other learning methods. After a period of overcompensating your child may begin to fail and this will not improve unless he is give tools to overcome these deficits. This may result in classroom behavior problems, poor grades and acting out at home.
• Schools are pushed to do more and more every year with less financial compensation. They will do their best but you, as the consumer parent, will need to advocate for your child.
• If no learning disability is identified and all other possibilities have been eliminated and your child is still inattentive or hyperactive you may wish to ask your pediatrician to finally rule out ADHD.