Originally Posted by
o_mom
This brings up something that has been bothering me about the whole situation. To me, the goal of therapy/therapeutic placement should be to catch him up to his peers. They seem to be taking almost the 'easy' way out of just letting him stay behind. If he were within a month or two of the cutoff and could go either way, I think that would be one thing, but to be 6-9 months older than the other kids should not be a consideration unless they have very specific, objective measures that show he is globally delayed by that much AND that he cannot catch up even with support and therapy. I cannot understand a school saying that their goal is to bring him up to a level a year below his age.
I agree with this.
To me, the question of whether or not it would benefit a child to be held back depends on whether the child has a delay or a disorder.
If the child has a delay, that means that the child is following normal development, just at a slower pace. The delayed child can benefit from some extra services to help him/her get through a particularly troublesome phase, but overall the child is expected to catch up to his/her peers with minimal extra help. This is the child who can do really well with an extra year.
However, the child has a disorder, that means that he/she is following a different developmental path. Extra time is not going to change that path; more serious intervention is needed. That could mean special services, cognative behavioral therapy, medication, diet changes, special educational techniques, or a combination of these. The goal of these interventions should be to allow the child to function in an environment with his/her peers, not with children who are markedly younger.
Since there is no evidence of global delay and there is evidence of a disorder, I think you should give serious thought to placing your child in an age-appropriate classroom.
Gena
DS, age 11 and always amazing
“Autistics are the ultimate square pegs, and the problem with pounding a square peg into a round hole is not that the hammering is hard work. It's that you're destroying the peg." - Paul Collins, Not Even Wrong