I STEELED MYSELF for a meeting with Tim’s principal, special education teacher, and classroom teacher at his new elementary school in late August. But this principal was a special education expert, and the meeting could not have been more different from the ones to which I had become accustomed. Everyone from the school was knowledgeable about Tim’s IEP and was on the same page. His IEP was in place. The computer was in his classroom, and someone would train Tim to use it. An aide was assigned to Tim’s classroom to help meet his needs and the needs of other students in the class. The teachers had identified a classroom “buddy” for Tim to help with his peer relations and to check assignment sheets with Tim at the end of each day. The teachers had read Tim’s evaluations and had a list of assignment modifications they believed would play to Tim’s auditory strengths while helping him overcome or minimize his writing and spelling deficits.
Tim’s behavioral issues were in apparent remission that fall. I thought this might be related to the change in environment. In any case, it gave the school time to focus on Tim’s academic problems. He was especially weak in writing and spelling, and he had few organizational skills. The school staff implemented the modifications in his IEP, and after a few weeks he seemed better organized and his grades started to improve. He received plenty of well-earned positive reinforcement.
His classroom teacher skillfully picked up on the nuances of praise that were supposed to have been incorporated into Tim’s IEP the previous year. In one instance, she wrote him a note praising him for “working hard on being organized.” He beamed when he saw it, and the transformation in his attitude in general was striking. He set aside his ambition to be the “school bully” and wrote a paper on kindness. “There are many ways to be kind to people,” he wrote. “One way would be to donate money to a homeless shelter. Another way that I would show kindness would be to read a story to a blind person. I would babysit for my little brother to be helpful to my mom and dad. I could help my brother or sister with their homework to show that I am thoughtful. One other way I could show that I am a caring person would be to rake leaves in my neighborhood. Those are just a few of the many ways to be kind to other people.”
Tim’s fourth-grade instructional program also played to his active imagination. In another paper, he described what it would be like if he could talk with animals. “If I am late for school my dog could wake me up. I could plan anything with animals. I could fly with a crow. I would feel like a king, because the animals would be my subjects. It could be a dream come true. I could play with an alligator without him eating me. If the animals could talk our language we would not have so much work, because they could do it for us. I could swim with a seal or jump with a kangaroo. It would be the funnest thing.”
Throughout the fall, Tim went happily to school every day. He had no absences and no tardies, and nearly all of his grades were in the B range. In November, Tim’s teacher reported that he was making good progress and that she enjoyed having him in her class.
Just as I thought that Tim might be out of the woods, things took a turn for the worse. The students had begun to switch rooms and teachers for certain classes, called “specials.” One of the specials was science, Tim’s favorite class. The science teacher had not been a part of our earlier meetings, and she did not pay attention to Tim’s IEP. She was “old school” and expected her students to conform to her methods of instruction. I even felt there was a dose of cruelty in her approach. One day, in front of the class, she emptied Tim’s desk onto the floor and told him to pick everything up and get it all organized again.
At first, I did not know about this incident. All I knew was that in mid-December, Tim was suddenly failing science. Linda and I contacted the teacher directly, but we were unsuccessful in getting her to understand Tim. She said that he should be able to do what was expected of him without a lot of support during the one class for which she had him.
We appealed to the principal, who set up a meeting for all of us. The science teacher reported that Tim was forgetting assignments and materials. It turned out that the “buddy system” was not in place in her classroom. She also noted that Tim’s behavior had taken a turn for the worse after the desk-clearing incident; he was throwing spitballs and wandering around the room when he should have been in his seat. Tim’s bad behavior was front and center again, but she saw no connection between her actions and his.
The principal worked hard to get things back on track. He encouraged the science teacher to follow Tim’s IEP and made sure Tim’s classroom aide accompanied him to his science class. With the aide there to run interference, Tim’s attitude and grades improved almost immediately, and he did A-level work in science over the next couple of months. Tim also developed a strong interest in current events and did A-level work in social studies as well. The highlight of his year was a class trip to the State Capitol, which I chaperoned. Several people there remembered Tim as a toddler and treated him as a returning celebrity. The clerk of the House of Representatives invited him to serve as the official guest chaplain for that day’s technical session of the House.
Tim started wrestling with his identity as a young black man that winter. He had never been terribly interested in his adoption, although we had always been open about it. Until fourth grade, he identified closely with me, and we often joked that we even looked just like each other, drawing incredulous looks from innocent bystanders who weren’t in on the joke. For his school picture, he insisted on wearing a jacket and tie, “because that’s what Dad wears when he has his picture taken.”
As he entered pre-adolescence, however, he began to talk about who he imagined his biological father to be. “I think he was probably a drug dealer,” he told me one day. “Not like you.” Both Linda and I assured Tim that there was no reason to believe that this was the case. For a brief time, he used Linda’s last name (which she had kept when we married) instead of mine on some of his schoolwork. He became a little more distant. None of this alarmed me because I understood that part of growing up was finding one’s own identity, but something else did. He was becoming more challenging at home than ever. I thought he might be emulating a friend who was also wrestling with issues of self-identity. This friend was two years older than Tim and always seemed to be in the vicinity when Tim was getting into trouble for bullying his siblings. And whenever I confronted them, I never got a straight answer to a question. Something did not seem quite right with that relationship.
Tim couldn’t say why, but his behavior and demeanor suddenly became much worse right around his tenth birthday. His teacher reported that he had stopped concentrating on his work, and his school performance was suffering. His Sunday School teacher expressed similar concerns. At home, he seemed anxious and worried and kept more to himself. We scheduled a meeting with the principal to talk things over and see if he had any insights, but he and Tim’s teachers were just as puzzled as we were by this change in behavior.
His science teacher reported in early May that Tim had choked another child in class that day. His classroom teacher added that Tim and the other student “had lots of battles this year.” Our brief respite seemed to be over.
At the end of that year Tim would reflect back on fourth grade, on balance, as having been a positive experience. “In fourth grade I had one favorite teacher,” he dictated for an assignment. “She was kind of like a teacher’s helper who switched from class to class. I think she helped me a lot in the fourth grade. On top of all that, she was nice to everybody. My teacher who I had all the time was nice, too. She worked us a little harder than I think we should have been worked but, other than that, fourth grade was fun.”
Tim had come a long way in one year. I was sorry that he had only one more year in that school, with its helpful principal and staff. I thought the next year would be a successful one. When it did not turn out this way, I was at least grateful that he was among adults who clearly cared about him.
I sat at Tim’s PPT meeting that August listening to school personnel praise him for his academic progress during the preceding year. Linda and I praised them for their efforts, too, and we agreed to keep his supports in place, including his aide, his daily assignment sheet, and his positive behavioral reinforcements.
Tim had suffered from unexplained episodes of aggressive, antisocial, and oppositional behavior in the spring. We thought he might need therapy, but these episodes disappeared during the family’s summer vacations in Virginia and Utah. So we waited, wondering if the problem was in Tim or in his environment, uncertain about what we should do next other than keeping his pediatrician informed until he suggested a referral to a specialist. On some days, it didn’t feel as if we were raising Tim so much as managing his growth while waiting for the next shoe to drop. He was a handful, but as I reminded myself constantly, he was also often delightful.
Tim returned to school with enthusiasm, happy that for the first and only time in his life, all three of his siblings would be in the same school as he was. He was growing into his five-foot frame, lean and strong, and he looked more like he belonged in seventh grade than in fifth. He also felt more grown up, and he especially wanted to be a mentor to his brother, Ben. Ben was entering kindergarten and had become Tim’s near-constant companion.
Tim took some standardized tests at the beginning of the school year. We all wanted to see where he stood academically in comparison to his peers, so we agreed with his principal and teachers that he would take them like every other student. I didn’t expect him to do well because they weren’t modified in any way to account for his learning disabilities, but I was still surprised by his low score in math, where he placed in the third percentile. He was in the thirty-fifth percentile in reading and around the middle of the pack in writing. But his spelling was very poor. After getting the results, we met with his new classroom teacher and his special education teacher. We talked over some ideas they had to help Tim.
They proposed sending home some of Tim’s spelling words every day instead of all of them once a week, so that we could work with him on spelling in small doses throughout the week. I thought this was a good idea, especially when they added that this would give them the chance to evaluate his spelling daily to look for patterns in his misspelled words. They thought that if they could find some especially problematic letter or sound patterns, they might be able to modify his spelling instruction to help him improve. They thought that this might help his reading as well.
To address his math needs, they offered him a calculator. From the testing, it appeared that he was mastering math concepts but getting wrong answers because he had trouble with simple addition and subtraction. They didn’t want addition and subtraction to hold him back as they introduced new math concepts during the year.
Tim was working on the computer regularly but was not developing his keyboarding skills. The principal offered to purchase some new keyboarding software to see if that would help. Dictation software was not reliable enough at that time to be useful.
In my opinion, what distinguished this group of educators was that they were not bound by the rules. Instead, they adjusted their thinking when faced with new challenges. They worked as a team and were unusually skilled, creative, and collaborative in their approach. From my perspective, they did all that they could for Tim. But even their best efforts were not enough. Tim’s mental illness was about to present itself dramatically. And we would all see the need to integrate outside clinical treatment with Tim’s educational program.
Tim’s teacher was still optimistic about his potential after the first marking period. “When Tim does contribute to the class discussion,” he wrote on Tim’s progress report, “his thoughts are very well-formed. He sounds more like a 7th grader in his reasoning.” He added: “Tim has been a welcome student in all areas. He adds much to the class with his knowledge of many diverse topics. His advancement in all areas is continuing, with no real lapses in any area being evident.”
But just after we received this report, Tim lost focus again. When redirected he became easily agitated, both at school and at home. He started fighting again with other children in school. He became even more forgetful and was increasingly impulsive, aggressive toward his siblings, depressed, and angry. He began stealing again. When he was caught, he was defiant. He also had trouble sleeping. I found him wandering around the house at all hours of the night, unable to settle down. We talked with his pediatrician, who decided to discontinue Tim’s Ritalin for good because he thought it might be contributing to Tim’s anxiety. But because we were not averse to trying other or newer medications with Tim, when Tim’s focus and concentration worsened again, we looked into other medications and tried Adderall, which had at best a modest effect on his symptoms.
We could see the change in Tim’s personality in his own words and deeds. In September, Tim had written about cruelty to animals. His empathy was apparent: “Cruelty to animals is against the law. Because the animals fear pain just [like] you and me. So if you don’t feed cows there will be no food. And if you put toxins in the water fish will die. Sometime in the circus they whip lions and they might bite you in the cage. And if a little kid is there he might be traumatized for life at the sight of a grown man getting eaten by a lion. Some animals can tell us about our past like how our ancestors were and stuff like that and if you abuse them they might die. I think abusing animals is bad and I hope you do, too.”
Three months later, I was very worried that Tim was losing his empathy. He made a slingshot and aimed it at birds. He tied up our dog and wouldn’t let her loose. He hit his siblings when they touched his toys. He continued taking things that didn’t belong to him and sometimes damaged them. Small amounts of money went missing from the house and turned up among Tim’s possessions.
Tim also began to put some distance between himself and his older neighborhood friend. He would not say why, other than that “he did some bad things.” I wondered if this might be related to Tim’s new behaviors, but Tim was mum. He just became agitated when Linda or I brought up the subject. When it was clear that Tim wouldn’t talk to us, we started searching for a therapist.
We barely got through the holidays. By the time Tim went back to school after the Christmas break, our attention was devoted nearly entirely to his behavioral problems rather than his academic troubles.
In January, after a particularly rough day, Tim gulped down a few ounces of mouthwash. He said that he was trying to get drunk. We called the state poison control center in a panic and were told not to worry but to have him evaluated as soon as we could.
Then we got a call from Tim’s teacher saying that he had been misbehaving at school. But when his teacher had tried gently to redirect him, Tim broke down in tears, wailing that he was a bad person and curling up into a fetal position on the floor. He was inconsolable for several minutes, and when he finally calmed down he was afraid to leave his teacher’s side for the rest of the day.
We took action immediately. We talked over both incidents with the pediatrician, Tim’s teacher, and the principal. We also made an appointment for Tim to have a psychiatric evaluation at a nearby children’s hospital. The principal agreed that Tim’s mental health problems were affecting his educational performance, and so at the principal’s urging the school district agreed to pay for this evaluation and to incorporate the results into his IEP. We also found a psychologist, Dr. D, who agreed to treat Tim.
On the day in mid-February that we took Tim to the hospital for his evaluation, he was especially distressed and unhappy. The specialist who did the evaluation wrote that Tim had “a number of neurobehavioral problems including inattention and impulsivity. In addition, I feel there is also an element of depression and also anger.” The specialist decided to put Tim on desipramine, an antidepressant that is also sometimes used to manage symptoms of ADHD. Tim began his therapy with Dr. D right away.
A little more than a week later, Ben accidentally broke Tim’s cherished old scooter. The scooter was aged and worn, and barely held together. It broke in two when Ben stepped on it. Tim erupted in uncontrolled anger when he heard the news and yelled that he was going to kill Ben. He stormed into the kitchen and grabbed a knife from the drawer. Linda and I both immediately blocked the door, whereupon he threatened to kill us or himself. It took us several minutes to calm him down and get the knife away from him. For the rest of the night, we kept Ben—who had no idea Tim was after him—away from Tim, and at least one of us stayed close to Tim at all times. After we put Tim to bed, we quietly took all the sharp knives out of our kitchen drawers and locked them away. I was not afraid of Tim, and I did not think that he would use the knives, but I also did not want to take any chances. And I wanted to be sure that our other children were safe in our house.
A few days later, there was an incident on the school bus. Tim started to fight with some other children, and when the driver tried to break it up, Tim was defiant, shouting “You can’t make me stop!” The driver reported the incident to the principal, who reported it to us. The next day, Tim accosted Larissa, blasting his boom box in her face to annoy her. She screamed loudly for help, and when Linda and I responded by taking the boom box away from Tim, he tried to hurl himself over the second-floor banister of our house. When we blocked his way, he grabbed a hockey stick from his room and threatened Linda with it. When I took the stick away from him, he started screaming and punching us. We pulled him down to the floor and restrained him for several minutes. At first, he spit on us and threatened to kill us, but finally he calmed down. We helped him back to his feet and cleaned ourselves up. By now, I couldn’t wait to get him to his next therapy session and for the promised effects of his new medication to kick in.
As bad as things had become, they were about to get worse. Over the next two weeks, we were in regular contact with a psychiatrist to whom we had been referred and Dr. D. The school scheduled a PPT meeting so we could discuss the psychiatrist’s report and decide what we should do next. No one knew what was happening to Tim, but we all agreed that for the time being he needed to be monitored constantly at school and at home. The next day he got into a fight during his after-school program.
I was keeping notes for Dr. D about Tim’s behavior. One day we had to keep Tim home from school because he was threatening to cut his sister with one of the dull knives that were still in the kitchen drawer. We took that knife away from him and later locked up all of the dull knives, too. Then Tim pulled a switchblade out of his pocket. We didn’t know where he had gotten it, and we locked it up as well. We were exhausted from worry, from trying to anticipate Tim’s next move, and from trying to protect our other children. We did our best to hold things together from appointment to appointment, to do our full-time jobs, and to maintain a semblance of normalcy in our household. As our situation worsened, we did not have any respite; we didn’t trust Tim with any of our usual sitters.
Our appointment with Dr. D provided no illumination about Tim’s condition. Tim was apparently disclosing very little to his therapist. A snow day followed, and Tim and his siblings spent the day in the house. He was testy all day, and none of them would play with him. He finally declared that he was going to run away and charged out of the house into the snow. He then apparently decided it was too cold to run away and came sullenly back in, then headed to his room to listen to music.
The next day we took him to an indoor play space so he could run off some steam. That night at around ten, as I was putting the last of the day’s dishes away, Tim came racing through the kitchen on his Rollerblades wearing only underwear and burst out the door into the below-freezing weather to skate down the center of the busy state road on which we lived. I had to call 911 for help. The police found him, unharmed, nearly a mile from home. When they brought him back home, they suggested that we seek therapy for him. I told them we already had.
Tim was clearly out of control. We called the hospital-based specialist who had evaluated Tim three weeks earlier, and he agreed to see Tim immediately. As Linda and I drove up Interstate 91 toward the hospital, Tim tried to jump out of the car. We were barely able to keep him under control and drove straight to the nearest hospital emergency room. He was evaluated there. His desipramine dose was tripled, and he was admitted to the children’s unit at a local psychiatric hospital.
Tim’s first hospitalization for mental illness lasted from March 10 to March 15, 1996—one week shy of his eleventh birthday. This was the first of what were to be many hospitalizations. I hoped that we would get a handle on his diagnosis and some better clues as to how to manage and treat what we now clearly recognized was a mental illness. It had taken us five years to get to this point—five years caught in a spiral of fits and starts with school IEPs aimed at learning disabilities, five years of family life turning on a dime from calm to chaotic, five years of worry that Tim was getting into way too much trouble for a normal child, five years of increasing concern for the safety and well-being of our other children. Now we would have an answer—and as frightened as I was about what we might be facing with a potentially serious disease, I thought I would now have at least some strategies for how we could all stop spinning in place and move forward again. I also thought that he would leave the hospital with a treatment plan with some clear next steps. I was naive. We may have had a generic diagnosis, “mental illness,” but that was a little like coming home from the hospital knowing only that you have “cancer.” Which one makes all the difference in your treatment. For us, arriving at a precise diagnosis would take six more years, not six days.
Tim felt deserted by us during his stay in the hospital. And putting him there made me feel as if I had failed him—at least a little—as a parent. Shouldn’t I have been able to manage things better, I wondered, and willed him to happiness? Instead, I was confronted by an angry and contrary child during his first day there and went home relieved that he was safe but wondering if our relationship would survive. Fortunately, Tim felt better after a good night’s sleep, and so did I. He was taken off the desipramine on the second day, and his condition seemed to improve. He seemed a little more like himself again, and I was hoping that everything would be back to normal in a few days. He attended group therapy sessions the next two days, and on the fifth day he learned that if he signed a behavior contract with us, the hospital would discharge him. So he signed it. The next day, he was deemed stable and was discharged.
As it turned out, the six days of hospitalization for which our insurance company agreed to pay, though generous by the standards of the day, did not give us time even to scratch the surface of his illness. Tim’s medication dosage was adjusted, and he was stabilized and sent home. That was pretty much it. The rest we would have to figure out later.
At the hospital, Tim was diagnosed with depression. This was added to the learning disability, ADHD, and executive dysfunction disorder diagnoses he had received in his earlier assessments. His “label list” was starting to grow.
I worried about the use of the behavior contract with Tim. It was one thing to have such a contract if Tim could control his behavior, but he did not seem capable of that in those times of crisis. If his mental illness meant that he couldn’t, then a behavior contract was the last thing he needed, since it would only guarantee failure. In hindsight, my worries were unfounded. Tim’s mental illness was already so advanced that the contract was simply irrelevant.
Tim left the hospital with a referral to a child psychiatrist and a plan to see Dr. D twice weekly. On our morning trips to Dr. D’s office, Tim and I listened to Imus in the Morning. Tim found the show hilarious, and the laughter generally put him in a good frame of mind as he started his therapy. Tim never wanted to talk about his sessions afterward, so I didn’t pressure him.
One day, Dr. D invited me in after Tim’s appointment and told me that Tim had reported hearing voices during the night. The voices were not telling him to do bad things, but they did bother him. While I knew that hearing voices could be a sign of serious mental illness, Dr. D suggested that Tim might be experiencing auditory hallucinations because he was not getting enough sleep. He had spoken with Tim’s psychiatrist, and they wanted to start Tim on trazodone, an antidepressant also used off-label to treat sleep disorders. Linda and I agreed to this. Tim began to sleep better at night, and the voices seemed to abate.
At the same time, Tim’s principal suggested that we have a once-a-week informal PPT meeting at the school. These meetings generally lasted only fifteen minutes, but they gave us a chance to report on any weekend problems we had had at home, and gave teachers an opportunity to share any concerns they had about the coming week.
Linda and I had only a vague notion of what the underlying cause of Tim’s depression might be. His stay in the hospital had yielded no useful information on that front. So we muddled through the best we could. We made a long list of possibilities and shared it with Dr. D: Tim’s adoption, his race, having white parents, having parents with strong values (vegetarian, pacifist, environmentally conscious), his cognitive dissonance over being better informed in some ways than his peers but having a difficult time with academics that came easily to them, his learning disability, his ADHD, his social reticence, his sensory hypersensitivity, his craving for intense stimulation, his poor sleep patterns, and his inconsistent eating patterns. In other words, we were searching for anything—no matter how unlikely—that would give us a clue as to what was the matter with Tim.
Tim’s principal then asked the school district to commission three more evaluations of Tim. The first was a neurological evaluation by the pediatric neurologist who had examined Tim in the third grade. The second was an educational evaluation by a consultant who was experienced in developing educational plans for children with emotional disturbances. The third was a psychological evaluation by Dr. D.
The education consultant completed her evaluation in May, with recommendations for the staff to implement in late August in the sixth-grade-only school Tim would be attending. She addressed both Tim’s educational and his clinical needs. She recommended that the informal weekly Monday meeting be continued. She explained that Tim’s combination of learning, emotional, and psychological needs was complex and required ongoing collaboration among educators, therapists, and parents in developing his sixth-grade program. She also recommended the continued use of assistive technology, recognizing that Tim was not yet proficient in using the computer for schoolwork.
She specified several modifications that she believed Tim would need in his educational program for the next year. These included specific, brief assignments on which he could focus; modified homework; the choice of taking tests orally or in writing; and some freedom to move about the classroom during instructional periods. She recommended that Tim continue to have an aide in the classroom and that an informal “circle of friends” be organized to help Tim improve his ability to relate positively to his peers.
She also recommended a program of self-management-skills training for Tim. Because of his poor understanding of cause and effect and his poor response to negative consequences, she advised that he be given a formal method for processing behaviors and their natural consequences. She also recommended that he continue his therapy with Dr. D and that Dr. D’s feedback and suggestions be incorporated into Tim’s educational plan.
I was grateful that Tim’s principal had taken the initiative to commission this evaluation, but he went even further to make it part of Tim’s formal plan of instruction by arranging two more meetings before the end of the school year. The first was a meeting for him and us with the principal of the sixth-grade school to talk informally about Tim’s needs, to review the recommendations, and to introduce us to the school’s program. After the meeting, the new principal was positive and upbeat, and he assured us that Tim would have a smooth transition to his school. However, he also candidly acknowledged that by the rules of his school, some of Tim’s behaviors could lead to suspensions. We talked at length about whether suspensions were in Tim’s best interest and agreed that they were not because of Tim’s significant academic needs and because he did not respond well to negative consequences. We agreed to take this subject up at the meeting scheduled for the following day—a formal PPT meeting to adopt the education consultant’s recommendations and develop Tim’s IEP for the following year.
Toward the end of the meeting, Linda and I brought up a sensitive subject. We had learned that sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students rode the same bus to school, even though the seventh- and eighth-grade students attended a different school. This meant that Tim would be riding the same bus as an older boy of whom he was afraid. Dr. D was working with Tim on getting him to articulate why he was afraid of this boy, but at the moment we only knew that he was genuinely afraid of being near this boy, so we asked whether the bus routes could be divided up so that the two of them would be on different buses. The principal assured us that he would look into this.
We met the next day for a PPT meeting that included the principals and staff from both schools. Tim’s IEP documented his academic progress and spelled out his strengths and weaknesses in detail: “Tim has done satisfactory work in all areas. He does an especially good job when a project interests him. Tim is very well informed in all areas of current events and has much interest in this area. His organization skills are very weak. He needs a lot of structure and assistance in the area. Tim’s learning style is through the auditory channel. He has good long-term memory skills.”
The IEP also clearly referenced Tim’s mental illness, so that there could be no misunderstanding about its effect on his ability to learn. It recorded that “Tim is presently on medication to treat clinical depression and ADD. He attends therapy sessions twice weekly.”
It also addressed the issue of suspensions. After everyone agreed that suspensions should not be used for Tim, the phrase “suspension of Tim is not an option” was written into the IEP. The principal agreed to convene another PPT meeting in the fall to develop a behavior support plan.
Though fifth grade had been full of unexplained illnesses and unexpected crises for Tim, he had surprisingly good memories of that year. He wrote the following in June:
In fifth grade I had two favorite teachers. One was Mr. N and one was Mrs. C. I like Mrs. C because she told me to put away my toys when Mr. N came around so I didn’t get in trouble. But, there was always time when I was tempted to take them out again. Mrs. C also was good because she gave us ice cream parties and most of us didn’t deserve it. (But not me!) Mr. N I like for a lot of reasons. He helps me on a lot of things and I like how he reads his stories, how he kind of is the character he is reading about. He’s a sweet old guy.
Some other people that are pretty good is the secretary and the principal. They don’t help me as much but they help me on things that I don’t even realize. I think this school is good even though I’m a new kid.
I understood two things as Tim left fifth grade behind. One was that for Tim to succeed in sixth grade, we were likely to need the same level of commitment to his IEP from the sixth-grade staff that we had gotten from the fifth-grade staff. The other was that when problems arose, as it seemed almost inevitable they would, we would need to be creative in developing new strategies to manage both his mental health needs and his educational program. As it turned out, we got neither commitment nor creativity in sixth grade. In fact, the day in June when we agreed on Tim’s IEP, two months before he started school, would prove to be the high-water mark of Tim’s sixth-grade experience.
And largely because of this, after fifth grade Tim would never have another normal year in school again.