Olivia Update

Well, as you know, we've spent the last 2 months in the re-evaluation process with Olivia for school. Probably 10 different specialist have been visiting her in the classroom, administering testing and providing questionnaires for us to complete. We've spent about 4 hours each week for a month and a half in meetings and screenings. It's been exhausting as well as a bit difficult to coordinate for Jason and I with work. At this point, we have all of the results except for one set of testing and we are finally putting a plan into place.

First off, they found many many areas that Olivia is delayed. Of primary concern is her IQ, behavior, and ability to process language. Anyone who spends time with Olivia knows that short and sweet is the best way to communicate with her. It has been confirmed once again that there is a significant discrepancy in her receptive language and expressive language. She is original in that her expressive language abilities (what she can say) are rated much higher than her receptive language (what she takes in). They are unclear whether it is an unexplainable 'block' of some kind or whether it is her IQ. It seems to be the biggest problem when words are strung together--for example, she can easily pass one word "what does this mean" screenings, but when she is confronted by instructions in sentence form, she is unable to gather all of it together. This is what causes our behavior problems. Essentially, Olivia lives in a very uncertain environment most of the time. Because she doesn't understand directions and verbal information very well, people will tell her things but she doesn't interpret it well. Her initial reaction to most things is "no" and she acts out so that she can control the situation (and thereby know what is going on). This has led to a lot of noncompliance in our lives which makes me less confident in the scores of some of her testing as well. Her acting out and the results from that make her very anxious in new situations or situations she cannot control and understand.

Her teachers state that she can barely count to 5. I have repeatedly heard her count to 40 with 3 errors. I have seen her take exams that she knows more of the answers to than they can use. For example, Olivia purposely answers letters incorrectly because she thinks it's funny. She does this daily with me. In standardized testing, they get one chance and only a set number of prompts. I'm not saying that I don't believe that Olivia struggles and needs assistance, I just think that there is more in Olivia's head than we can get to right now. When the primary way of explaining all concepts is though speaking and she is unable to process that information well, it certainly puts her at a disadvantage and probably always will.

As far as our current plan. In two weeks, we will be withdrawing her from the preschool she is in right now. For whatever reason--probably because she was not properly supported in January--she has developed a lot of bad habits in her behavior. Her behavior (whining, tantrums, screaming, not following directions, etc.) are disruptive to the class and certainly make it difficult for her to learn. Because of the large student to teacher ratio and the less structured environment, Livi has learned to use her poor behavior to get the attention she needs. We will be placing Olivia in the old school summer school program that Columbia offers. Jocelyn attends Summer Adventure (which is called summer school, but is really a fun learning program that is optional). Olivia will be attending the summer school for kids who are not meeting expectation in Kindergarten. They have allowed her to attend the older kids summer school program instead of the preschool summer school program because we all feel it will help set expectations in a more similar environment to kindergarten. We are going to give her a break after that and work to reset expectations for behavior by having her go to Nisho's house for the rest of the summer. By the time you factor our vacations and running around, she will really only be there 3-4 weeks.

Olivia will be pulled out of kindergarten for probably 3 hours per day. She will receive 90 minutes of speech each week, 60 minutes of adaptive PE (and will attend regular PE as well), 300 minutes of behavioral assistance and 300 minutes of academic assistance. If she attends school in our 'home district' the kindergarten classroom there has 2 teachers which would also be helpful to Olivia. If she transfers to Grant, the kindergarten would only have 1 teacher. So, we have some more considerations about Olivia's school to think about. We plan to speak with the principal at Josie's school to see if these are things that can be offered there. We hope to make a decision soon.

Finally, we are waiting for results from the Neuro-Psych evaluation that took place at the Thompson Center. It will be after the 16th that we receive those results. They administered a different IQ test to Olivia there--one that they do not have to have verbal instructions for. I did not get the impression that Livi did better with that one so I do not expect any new information from there. They did say that if she has autism characteristics that they are very mild based on her attention to people. Olivia turns her head to see what is going on around her, etc.

Anyway, that is an update on what's been going on so far with Olivia's school. We'll keep you posted...