As I have shared several times over the past couple of months, hub and I have been facing the agonizing decision of what to do about our adopted child’s special needs and school. Our adopted child has been attending a Montessori school since he was in pre-K, and he loves it. Most of his close friends go to this school, and many of my close friends have children there as well. (We met doing PTA work together.) This school was such a great fit for our adopted child, even with his special needs (ADHD and learning disabilities), as long as it was mostly Montessori.

However, thanks to my “favorite” (NOT!) piece of legislation called the No Child Left Behind Act, this public Montessori school is “forced” to change to a more traditional format in the third grade so that students can pass the end of grade tests. (Don’t even get me started on pressuring eight year old children with standardized testing and preventing them from advancing to fourth grade based upon a test score.) That is when everything blew up with my adopted child. As long as he could work at his own pace using the Montessori materials, my son was successful in school. As soon as it went traditional, he started failing his classes with abysmal benchmark scores for the standardized testing.

Hub and I have found a wonderful private school that specializes in teaching children with ADHD and learning disabilities. You must have an IEP and one or both conditions to apply to the school. The upside is that every teacher has a degree in learning disabilities, and the classes have a 1:6 teacher-student ratio. The downside is that you have to pay out the nose for this.

I have written several times over the past few months about the stress of parenting an adopted child with special needs. My adopted child has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as well as across-the-board learning disabilities. The combination has made third grade just oodles of fun. Right now, dealing with my special needs adopted child’s many issues is the largest stressor in my life.

We have now reached the halfway point of third grade, and things are not looking good. I spend an hour on homework with him each day, and I have to walk him through every single step because of his learning disabilities. He cannot read long passages or process multi-step questions. He also reads by the word, not the phrase, and frequently “forgets” what he read by the time he gets to the end of the paragraph.

The book pictured, “On Their Own.” was written by Anne Ford, to help others parenting special needs children through adulthood. Anne Ford shares what she learned over the years raising her daughter who was diagnosed with disabilities as a toddler. Fortunately we can avoid some of the trials and errors she experienced over the years by reading her book, and doing our own research on the internet. Anne makes a very important point/distinction in her book. Those trying to use politically correct language and some educational specialist want to change the term “learning disabilities” to “learning differences.” The main reason according to Anne is that the word “disabilities” brings to mind flaws, whereas “differences” imply a different style of learning.