in need of help/advice...

AnonyMom
Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:34:25 +0000

Hi smartteenangel!

Happymomof1 has some excellent advice. Even if your school doesn’t have its own psychologist, if you’re in the US, your school district either has a psychologist on its payroll or has a psychologist it uses for referrals. Please get to your GC asap and tell her what you’ve told us. Insist that you need to be worked up for an LD. In terms of the teachers needing to fill out forms, ask your GC just to be sure, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

It may be that the doctor who talked with your dad is thinking of situations in which the teacher notices that a student is, for example, intelligent and seems to understand the material, but is having a problem with tests that would seem to indicate an LD, and the teacher then requests that the student be evaluated for an LD. I’m assuming that the teacher in that situation would have to fill out a form explaining why he was requesting the evaluation. But in general, no, I don’t think it’s the case that all of the teachers are polled.

Moreover, if you do end up with a diagnosis of an LD, teachers will have to be told that you receive accommodations so that they can cooperate, but the school cannot reveal your diagnosis to teachers or to colleges, nor can the school tell the colleges that you receive accommodations. Period. Your GC and teacher recommendations can’t mention the LD or the accommodations unless you request that mention be made. In short, this is a medical diagnosis and it is therefore private.

Sometimes parents are worried that if the student is worked up for an LD, the student will end up with a label that will follow the student forever and make it difficult to get into college or get a job. This is simply not what happens. In fact, there are laws that protect students from having this happen.

Finally, you might be surprised at how much support teachers will offer. My kid’s teachers hadn’t filled out any kind of forms and never knew what the diagnosis was unless he told them. But when the ETS turned him down for appropriate accommodations on the SAT, a bunch of his teachers filled out forms for him, and even wrote letters on their own, and the ETS changed its mind based on their observations. Some of your experienced teachers might have suspected that something is going on that is keeping your from performing at the level they’d expect from you, and may be very happy and relieved when the issue is addressed. Teacher observations could conceivably help you get the support you need.

Good luck! Please keep posting and let us know how it’s going.