School Decision Finally Made!

Last Tuesday we finally met with the psychologist who was assessing the boys to help us decide if they were really for K or if he'd suggest a bonus pre-K year for them. He had a very formal report put together for us (it was just J & I) and we went over both of the boys for a good hour or more.

Essentially, he highly recommended N have a bonus year. N was having a hard time verbalizing complex thoughts. If the psych read N a story and asked N to paraphrase it, he couldn't. He had a hard time putting words together to define specific items which he ultimately knew what they were (like a telephone, an umbrella, etc.). The psych didn't know for certain if there was a true speech issue or if it was more developmental and he just needs more time. He did think though that that was probably the reason for N's anxiety and avoidance of new situations (those require more verbal skills and that overwhelms N at this point).

For S, he said that he wouldn't be disadvantaged by having a bonus year as well (hard to tell 100% if he would have recommended for S to go on to K if we weren't holding N back). He definitely felt it was more important to keep them together. And, S showed some deficiencies in certain areas that he thought time would only help. The things for S were his fine motor skills and his ability to read non-verbal clues (that one was really surprising).

I was hugely relieved that we went through the exercise and got a definitive answer. We notified the preschool and the Glendale language program. And then I went ahead and made an appointment with a speech therapist for N just to take this one step further and see if they felt N needed additional therapy specific to that area or just time and patience. That appointment is next week so it will be interesting to see. I hope they can help him and that the result of that help is that N feels so much more comfortable in new situations and gets more social confidence.