I am dreading my ARD meeting tomorrow!!! We have a student with SLD in every area. Tomorrow I am changing this to ID. His GIA is 55 well below the 70 cutoff and has adaptive skills are poor. Personally, I'm infuriated that the last diagnostician diagnosed him this way, thus me changing it. However, the parent does not want him I'm FA (Functional Academics) but he will not be successful in the gen. Ed. Or even resource program. I fear a rough ARD is coming!
I understand your frustration. I didn't have this situation as a diag, but something like this happened when I was a sped teacher. A student came in with an IQ of 52, labeled LD, but was working WAY below grade level. As a diag, we wouldn't make the decision on our own, but after having discussions with a group of diags and other personnel about what is best for the student. Good luck today!
I think what Kevin is saying is that he would like the diagnosis changed. I don't know exactly what the acronyms mean but in my state it would be MH which is mentally handicapped. I'm not sure if ARD is an IEP or MDT.
It's a team decision technically but diagnosticians typically state their opinion based on the data and the team typically agrees. I held the ARD but decided to do a Review of Existing Data to request more testing. I believe it will have the same end result according to the confidence intervals, but I didn't want to interpret tests that I didn't personally administer. Reconvene in 30 days to break the news! ARD meeting are Texas IEP meetings. Admission Review & Dismissal meetings. Student is in 4th grade.
I remember reading an article about just how terrible that model is. I wish I could remember the name of it. Anyway, #1 concern is ---don't use all of those acronyms in the meeting. Use terms the parents and other team members can understand.
I obviously don't use acronyms in meetings. Typically I pull out my bell curve and park the range that is "within normal limits." I plot the individual scores for the parent to see where the scores fall. I also discuss the percentiles and what that means and the confidence intervals. I'm very analytic, which my principals and parents seem to like. That model works well for me, but my district doesn't do single testing. Any time we call for testing we test the whole child: emotional, behavioral, cognitively, academically, physically, and language. We then staff prior to ARDs to discuss. It's just that I am the one to talk about results in meetings. Also, all my initial evaluations consist of teacher information and at least one observation.
Sounds like you do a lot to help the parent understand and that's great. Of course, you know that there can be a lot of denial on the parents part. It's more work to test the whole child but really gives more reliable results and more support for your position. Confidence levels is not a term I have ever heard. Can you elaborate? I'm not a diag, I'm sped teacher.
Confidence intervals are a range of numbers that gives room for marginal test error - above or below the student's actual score.
Confidence Intervals are like 90% of the time (or whatever CI you select) the kid will score in this range. Similar to standard error but different.
