Two thoughts: my son wrote about his ADHD for his essay (against received wisdom). He got into 8 out of 10 schools he applied to. (All but 2 reaches; he also was admitted to two reaches).
And also your son might be right that college may be easier. There is so much less busywork! Both adhd sons did better in college, at least until Covid/online learning derailed one of them.
I am also planning to keep S24 on our health insurance as well as the OOS school insurance. His ADHD medications are a pain to get hold off due to the shortage, and his medical team here is amazing so I don’t want to lose them.
I have 2 ND kids. S26 has LDs and other diagnoses that manifest in EF problems, etc., but he won’t take meds to improve focus. Has great social awareness. We have tried to be as hands-off as possible with school and other responsibilities. It’s going okay (better mental health than last year). If college is in the cards, the search will be small. I wish we could afford to send him to a LAC but he’ll probably be restricted to in-state publics. Spouse works at a LAC so he could go there but I don’t know if that will be better than the alternatives. Maybe living at home for a while will be best for him (we wanna downsize so bad 
).
S23’s diagnosis manifests in excelling with academics and EF, but struggling socially, etc. He doesn’t need any formal accommodations but really wanted a school with smaller class sizes and not too many people in his major. The final thing that tipped his decision for his current school was that they have a lot of hand-holdy type student support. He takes full advantage of meeting with his career advisor regularly even as a freshman. His professors know him by name already. He feels really supported and even though he’s been slow to make friends, the environment is really nurturing. I’m surprised he gravitated to this school, but now that he’s there, it really makes sense. He said the vibes were “warm” and that’s why he liked it so much.
Great to hear everyone’s experiences and thoughts. Love that our kids are finding their places!
Thanks for sharing. S24 is similar to your S23. He is leaning towards a school with lots of support and I have been encouraged at all the options available to him. I’m hopeful it will work out. The ramp to launch my kid will be a little longer than many, but he will get there.
My kid’s school was a well-known LD-specific school, so there was no hiding it.
Since there is talk of semesters vs. trimesters, I’ll throw something else into the mix. One Course at a Time. Cornell College in Iowa, Colorado College and University of Montana-Western and Lynn University all have “block” schedules. Lynn University seems to be very supportive of kids with ADHD.
Yeah, I talked with my kiddo about the"one course at a time" schools early on as have a friend whose kid is at Colorado College. Mine wasn’t interested in this idea, thought he’d get bored just focusing on one class at a time. Since he didn’t apply, we’ll never know!
Same here, but I thought it would have been great.
Ditto with our LD student - disclosed as part of essays and was accepted at 10 of 12, including reaches. I think it depends on the entirety of the application - GPA, academic rigor, tests, LOR’s, etc.
My kids are now young adults successfully ensconced in careers so my experiences are a little old but I don’t think the basic lessons I took away have changed that much. I have also written a lot of this stuff in earlier posts so my apologies if I am repeating myself.
Two very bright kids. The older one (ShawSon) is extremely gifted (a neurosychologist called him severely gifted because his verbal IQ is extremely high and his performance IQ was 50 points below that). Dyslexia so severe that reading and writing physically hurt him. Speech delay. A little bit of ADHD on the side. ShawD exhibited serious ADHD (could not sit still through a dinner ever) and anxiety (they seem related). Both also had serious medical problems that in ShawD’s case, masked our identification of the ADHD (we had to work on making sure she wasn’t going blind).
We were negotiating on ShawSon’s behalf since 2nd grade, working on IEPs, getting teachers to actually believe that a kid that smart also had LDs despite extensive testing. In his case, the Deputy Superintendent of Schools suggested during his freshman year that we partially home school him (for English/writing/reading on which he needed help and math as HS honors math was trivial and tedious for him). We documented everything and conducted much business via email so we had documented our engagements with the school. With ShawD, the diagnosis came later – and at the suggestion of the private HS she was attending.
Takeaways. These may be somewhat idiosyncratic and may not apply to your child’s situation, but generally I think they move you in the right direction.
Document all accommodations that the student gets, even informal ones. In general, use email to document all interactions with teachers, special ed folks, Disabilities Services folks, professors.
Maintain good relationships with teachers and administrators. Start by assuming good will on their parts (they would want to do the right thing if they a) understood the situation and; b) were freed of institutional constraints. Make them part of your team if you can rather than your enemy. The only people we did not succed at in this regard was an English teacher and head of the English department at ShawSon’s HS – we needed the Dept head if we wanted him to get a regular HS instead of a homeschooled Diploma (but the Deputy Superintendent of Schools overrode them). We needed teachers to write things for both kids but especially for ShawD when we wanted them to get accommodations for SATs/ACTs. The Deputy Superintended of Schools volunteered to write a recommendation for ShawSon. The same will later be true with college DSO folks and professors.
Start early when trying to get accommodations for SATs/ACTs if your kid needs them. I negotiated for a year with the College Board for ShawSon and for a shorter but still long period for the ACTs for ShawD. We were successful in both cases getting the accommodations we requested. The psychologist I dealt with at the College Board has checked in occasionally about how ShawSon is doing – she predicted he would be doing great things in the world.
I would not advise disclosing your kids’ LDs to the school in the applications unless you need to. The admissions process is separate from the teaching function. Having LDs is unlikely to increase the probability of admission. With ShawSon, we needed to disclose but with ShawD we did not. ShawSon was an unusual but stellar candidate and I think the disclosure may have hurt him in a couple of cases. This has been discussed at length in some other threads.
Get information about what the schools approaches are to LDs and accommodations but meet with them and negotiate with them AFTER your child is admitted. Before the kid is admitted, you get general pablum: “we want to work with all kinds of learners,” etc. After your child is admitted, send them all the testing data (neuropsych/psych etc.) and then meet with them in person if you can (or by Zoom if you can’t), explain the accommodations your child has been getting. Ask what kind of accommodations they will provide for your kid. I don’t know if this is good advice, but ShawSon chose to apply to more schools than his peers because he just didn’t know how they would react to him. We did triage and the final two schools were a top NESCAC school and an Ivy. The head of Disability Services at the NESCAC school said, “If we admitted your son, we will do everything we can to make it work for him.” She even suggested accommodations he was not using that we did not know about. The Ivy had a language requirement. Given his LDs, he just can’t do foreign languages (which was in the neuropsych’ recommendations). The head of Disability Services hemmed and hawed (“After he is accepts, I will submit the relevant testing info to a committee to decide, but I don’t ask them unless the case is really strong because I want to maintain my credibility with the committee.” He also had never offered some of the accommodations the NESCAC school planned to offer. The NESCAC school was going to be easy (and was) and the Ivy was going to be grudging.
Focus on schools with distributions requirements that are not particularly restrictive or schools with no distribution requirements. For ShawSon, being able to limit the number of courses with heavy reading requirements.
Teach your kids how to ask for accommodations as they will have to be doing the work. In college, they may have to ask for things from the DSO and often from individual professors (both kids schools required them to remind the professor that they get certain accommodations on tests). I would write the emails with them watching in the beginning. We’d talk over how to write it to be more likely to be successful (this is part of my professional skill set). Over time, I let them do more. By college they were doing it, but would sometimes ask me to help with a sensitive emails.
Consider providing some scaffolding for them in the first couple of years, especially if they have EF issues. We hired someone who would help ShawSon keep track of his assignments (she had access to his emails). By junior year and maybe earlier, this was unnecessary. With ShawD, the DSO set her up with an upper class student in her field of study who helped her plan for what each week would look like. Again, at a certain point, she did not need it.
The good news. It all worked. ShawSon co-founded a company in the fall of his senior year, ran it for 1.5 years (it is still running) and was admitted to get a MS in Computational and Mathematical Engineering and an MBA for a university that is arguably the best in the world for what he wanted to do. He co-founded another company before he finished grad school. The company has raised three rounds of venture capital and is growing 30% quarter on quarter. He and the company have been recognized in national publications. He’s a bit burned out as the pace of work is pretty high. ShawD transferred after one semester to enroll in a joint BSN/MSN program. Great choice for her (and entirely her instigation). She graduated at age 23 and began working as a primary care provider. Just before she turned 30, she opened up a new clinic for her employer and then became the medical director of the clinic. She loves her work.
Is this helpful?
Apply for both ACT and SAT. Often one will give accommodations and the other won’t, but it is completely unpredictable which one you will be more successful with. (This information came from a CC at son’s school. They specialize in LD’s and send accommodation requests for over 50 kids a year so she probably has more insight than anyone).
When applying to colleges, don’t discount Honors programs. Often there isn’t more work or harder work, just different work. At S23’s school, the classes are small, discussion-based, interdisciplinary classes. Their assessments tend to be more “show what you learned” rather than test-based. He loves his honors classes and they work out so much better for him than the large, 200+ person lecture-based boring gen. eds would have. There is a thesis requirement, but they start working with you junior year and meet with you regularly, so you are forced to stay on a timeline. Even for those who drop honors before the thesis, the honors classes, additional advisor, (and early registration at his school) are very worth it.
Yes. TCB was recalcitrant with ShawSon and it took a whole year. ACT just followed suit.
With ShawD, TCB gave her the accommodations we wanted right away but she was going to do better on ACT and that took a while.
One other piece of advice that is a bit more general. This can be Item 9 on the list in my earlier post.
Our temptation is to work on remediating the problem (whether reading or writing or attention). Even in jobs later on in life, a company will identify an employee’s deficits and develop a plan to fix the deficits (these are often called annual development goals). I think it is important to help your kid a) identify his/her strengths; b) work to create an environment that plays more to strengths than weaknesses; and c) try to find a career path that plays to his/her strengths and downplays their weaknesses. Your kid can negotiate to make the environment suit him better.
So, ShawSon is legitimately brilliant but dyslexic (and so reads and writes slowly and has some fatigue with lots of reading/writing), speaks with a speech delay and has some ADHD. I advised him to look at colleges that had no or very limited distribution requirements, so he could avoid courses with 400 pages of reading a week or schedule one in a semester with other courses that have low reading/writing loads (e.g., math, art, symbolic logic, music, etc.). He is great at abstract conceptualization, so he took courses that drew heavily on that style. When he was in business school, he said to me, “Dad, I could be successful as the CEO of a big company but I could never rise within a company to become CEO.” He would have done well at a quant hedge fund but decided to pursue tech entrepreneurship, where his reading load is not high relative to working with people, developing strategy, directing others to create presentations, talking to investors etc. ShawD is very bright and has a much more concrete intelligence – she loves to store facts and then connect them with ideas/theories but is not interest in knowledge for knowledge’s sake. If/when he sells his company, he would like to create a venture studio that sees business opportunities, identifies potential CEOs/teams, provides initial capital, connections and guidance. Plays to his strengths even more than being a venture founder. So her job as a nurse practitioner is perfect. She stores all of the medical knowledge and journal articles and is a really good diagnostician. She also has terrific social skills, so makes patients comfortable. A much better job for her than, say, research in biology.
In short, help them learn how to construct a life that plays to their strengths.
Many of these issues can be alleviated if your kid’s major is in a small department.
My college sophomore has been able to have close support from her advisor, as well as close interactions with faculty members in her large R1 university because her major is very small.
Also, her major is mostly offered by large universities. Only a handful small liberal arts colleges do, but they usually only offer a Bachelor of Arts rather than a Bachelor of Science, which is insufficient preparation for the professional exams after graduation.
@InfoQuestMom, alternatively, a student may be able to do well in a school that enables one to create independent study courses. I don’t know if that is limited to small schools or small departments within schools.
While I agree, on the flip side, our daughter has dyslexia and severe ADHD so academics are not always fun and they take way longer than for other kids. She is an amazing worker and will succeed big time in the work force. She considered a gap year, but we mutually decided the risk was that she would “forget” many of her academic skills and enjoy work so much that she would not want to go back to school. We agreed on a post-college gap year if that’s what she decides. She is actually killing it in college. Getting great grades, doing clubs and even working at an internship. I think it really depends on the kid. If she was not dyslexic, the gap year may have been more attractive.
Good to hear that she is doing so well @MBR2022. Our dyslexic son did benefit from a gap year as he really needed a break (and surgery). But, his gap year activities included trying to finish a co-authored young adult novel and doing his college appications. (He put in the effort and the enterprise was sabotaged by his adult co-author, who has problems putting things out in the world for fear of failure). So, he kept up his writing. And he helped a professor with her research. So he didn’t really fall far behind. But, I can see how that could easily happen.
Completely agree that the benefits of a gap year is really kid dependent. My ASD/ADHD son is all about routine and momentum. A gap year would be very disruptive for him. We discussed it and he hated the idea of a gap year. But we are also fine with him taking 5 years to graduate if he needs to slow down.
It seems that it has been a few weeks since anyone posted here. I read through the thread and saw some good comments and information. Looking to see if anyone has any information regarding support for ND students at UC schools such as UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, UCD and UCI. S24 just got into all of them and is interested in some of them (as we live in CA) To my knowledge there is no real programs for ND students in these schools but sometimes there are things under the radar. Does anyone have any experience sending a ND kid to any of these schools or know of any support programs at them? Son is ASD and has thankfully done very well academically in high school. However, would benefit from a college program that provides academic counseling, peer mentors, access to tutors as needed for students with LD or ADHD/ASD. He is also admitted to U of Denver (LEP) and U of Arizona (SALT and Franke honors) so those are options but as the UC decisions arrived over the past two weeks he has now shown an interest in these schools. In my opinion, he should go where he has the best chance for success. It’s wonderful to get admitted to a highly competitive school and he should feel proud about it but in the end should go where most chance of success. If he can be successful at a UC school would be fine with that as well. Any thoughts? Thanks.