Things That Work #6: Professional Edu-Psych Assessment

Hold your hats, folks, this one's expensive. Or, it is if you do it right. But I promise you it'll be the best darned investment you'll make in the next ten years, both for you and your kid.

Yes, we are talking an Educational/Psychological assessment for your child. Why? There's a lot of reasons.

See, there's assessments and there's assessments. The basic ones that the folks in the schools and the front-lines educational support staff do are, well, kinda like walking around the car, counting the tires and kicking them, maybe taking it for a quick spin around the block. It really only catches the BIG stuff (car doesn't start, or brakes don't work) and it doesn't do anything for telling you WHY there are problems (car pulls to the right at highway speeds, for some reason, that's all we know from this evaluation).

But if you're seeking assessment, you already know that stuff is not working right. You want the mechanic who is going to pop the hood, crawl underneath it, test the individual systems, and tell you EXACTLY which part is contributing to the problems, and EXACTLY how that is going to affect the car's performance when you're trying to drive on the highway, parallel park, go up hills, all the stuff of which everyday driving is made.

But it's not just about the problems. A really systematic under-the-hood assessment can spot the strengths that are not immediately apparent either. "Ohmigod," says the expert assessor, "Did you know that there's a Ferrari engine installed in your car? And I have never seen fuel efficiency like you're getting. There are some fantastic things about this car!!"

Okay, enough comparing your kid to a car. But you get my basic point. You want the most experienced, in-depth, fine-grained, detailed assessment you can get, if you're going to actually fix, or at the very least compensate for, the things that make your child different.

Enter the Psychologist. One who specializes in pediatric assessments. But they're not all the same. You want one who is going to GET your child, who will work well with them and bring out the best in them (chances are the system already knows about the worst). I asked a bunch of people. I asked the principal of our school who she'd encountered in her work. I asked my family doctor. I asked friends who worked in social and educational services if they knew anyone. Before long, I had two names that were coming up regularly. Talked to both of them on the phone and quickly chose Dr. A (not her real initial).

She spent three one-hour sessions with T.K., gently and engagingly putting him through a wide assortment of tasks, and winding up the session promptly when his attention and motivation began to flag in a serious way. "We want his best," she said. She observed him in the classroom, collected input from his teacher and from me, and when the dust settled, rendered us a detailed 11-page report on our son, including recommendations on how to structure his school and learning experience for the best fit and most positive experience for everyone. Reviewed it with us, then scheduled a sit-down with the school personnel (us included).

It was fantastic. When the words, "He's a smart monkey, and I'm afraid he's getting bored," come out of MY mouth, nobody really registers that as something to do anything about. When the words, "He scores in the 99th percentile for abstract reasoning," come out of the psychologist's mouth, suddenly everyone's talking about enrichment, and gifted programming, and alternative approaches to conventional learning paths. When I say, "He stinks at handwriting, it's hard and annoying for him and he hates it," the immediate response is that he just needs to work harder and get used to it. When the psych says, "His fine-motor co-ordination scores at the 1st percentile and it's dragging down his performance and making school a miserable experience for him," suddenly everyone sits up and talks about alternative testing methods and occupational therapy and minimization of unneccessary busy-work writing while he builds his skills. His typically T.K. combination of extreme assets and extreme weaknesses has got the principal slinging around the phrase, "Gifted LD" (Learning Disabled) as if he's a jewel in the school's crown and not a burr under its saddle, and we've been propelled into this magical alternate universe where people actually stop and think a moment about what school must be like for a kid like T.K. Incredible.

The price for all this incredibleness? $1800 (Canadian). Yeah. Not cheap. But this document has magically transformed us from a difficult, noncompliant child and an annoyingly persistent mother to a highly-intelligent special-needs child and a member of his educational team. Plus the professional identification of his high intelligence puts us into the group of recognized exceptionalities for our school system (where the doctor's offhanded diagnosis of ADHD would not). So now we get an IEP (Individualized Education Plan), which is a formalized, specific, legal commitment by the school to work with T.K.'s particular learning needs. Worth it at twice the price.

"But," I hear you say, "Isn't it the school board's job to provide that kind of assessment service?" Well, yes and no. The lineups are long, the budget is limited, and the kids who get assessed tend to be the ones with super-heavy-duty challenges, with a side of assaultiveness or self-harm or we're-working-on-railroading-this-one-into-another-teaching-environment. If you aren't one of those, you'll wait a long time for a school-funded assessment. Like, forever. Forever's good for us, is it good for you? No?

And if you pay for the assessment, you can choose the assessor. I canvassed around, chose sources I respected, and then talked to two psychologists. Both were competent and well-spoken of, but one really lit up when talking about her work with brain-injured kids and kids with various chromosomal syndromes, where the other talked knowledgeably about kids with uneven development (like mine) and how their stuff played out in a classroom, plus she had a warm, humourous manner that I knew T.K. would take to. It was an easy pick.

And if you pay for it, you own it. They can't hold their meeting without you, since you are the custodian of that document, and you can choose who to share it with, and how much. There's more power in that than you think.

And it can help YOU. On the days when you are ripping your hair out wondering WHY this kid is not acting like the others, why childrearing is not the cakewalk for you that it is for your neighbour who has the typically-developing kid, well... on those days, it's good to know WHY. And cherish the undeniable strengths that go with the weaknesses.