You don’t know how much work has gone into making that statement a reality.
Five years ago, at an IEP meeting, Jonny’s team got together with us and informed us that “he was so far behind, they could not support his educational needs.”
Their advice to further Jonny’s education was to “transfer schools.” Not even kidding.
Looking back, frankly, it was the best advice they could have given us.
Jonny just hadn’t found the right “fit.”
When we started Jonny at a new school in a new program in 4th grade, he found a teacher who knew exactly how to motivate him, who supported him, who stood by him, who even worked remotely with him during the pandemic.
And then, in middle school, we found ANOTHER teacher who picked up where the other teacher left off, encouraging and engaging Jonny to do more than he thought possible.
And through it all, we had an auntie, who is now a 4th grade teacher, who refused to give up on Jonny, who did “auntie camp” as a 1:1 with Jonny every summer, year after year, and continued it throughout the pandemic offering to take him to a movie of his choice (or rent one) for each full chapter book he read and wrote about.
But the driving factor in Jonny’s success is Jonny himself. Thanks in part to Auntie, Jonny has simply made it a habit to read for half an hour every day (and write about what he read) before he plays with his tablet or plays video games. He doesn’t need any prompting or motivators.
He simply comes home from school and does it.
I don’t know where he got that work ethic. (Certainly not from me.)
Jonny will be 15 next month. He is starting high school this fall in a new school and that scares me to death.
I pray he can find a teacher and a program that is as good of a fit for him as his last 2 SPED teachers.
I pray that his progress in the next 4 years absolutely blows away the “expectation.”
I pray that when Jonny is a senior, we can look back and marvel at “how far we have come” from his freshman year when we were celebrating that he had “just started reading at grade level.”
#ausome