School District Preschool

Jackson qualified for the school district's preschool program! While it's great that he is going to continue getting the extra help he needs, it's also a little sad that he still needs the extra help. It's that parent thing about wanting your child to be perfect, but I know Jackson is special and we love him so much the way he is.

He was evaluated by the school district in several areas, including: Cognitive, Speech, Fine and Gross Motor, Behavior, and Socialization. Before his first evaluation appointment I had to fill out this super long parent questionnaire that covered several areas in development. The results from that questionnaire were then taken into consideration when looking at his scores from his school district testing.

His first day of evaluations were for Speech and Cognitive. He had no problem wowing the evaluators on his cognitive exam- he is definitely a smart kid! They score the cognitive exam in two ways and one of his scores placed him in the 99th percentile- which means only 1% of kids his same age that take the same test would score better than him. In his speech exam, he scored in the 46th percentile, which is close to average, and higher than I expected him to score. His past year in KOTM has certainly helped him improve his speech! The evaluators still had a few concerns about his speech- like his repetitive phrases, inconsistency in word pronunciations, and the high pitch that he tends to use, so they recommended that he be tested again at the beginning of the school year to check for progress. During the evaluation I ended up filling out another parent questionnaire- this time for autism - because within 5 minutes of Jackson's testing the one evaluator turned to me and asked if they had me fill out the autism questionnaire- Jackson was having difficulty moving on to the next task because he wanted to make sure the cards he was given to match to the pictures were perfectly lined up and a few other quirks were presenting themselves (along with his low scores from the first questionnaire in behavior and socialization). I wasn't surprised at all. I've suspected that Jackson would place on the Autism Spectrum Disorder scale for some time now- although he is certainly high-functioning.

His second day of evaluations were for Fine and Gross Motor. He did great in his fine motor evaluation except for in a couple key areas like stacking blocks higher than four (although he can do it at home just fine- but we have larger blocks) and inconsistency of hand usage. Those two areas brought his score down into the qualifying range (7th percentile or lower). His gross motor evaluation was next and he was tested in range of motion from jumping to walking in a straight line to doing a somersault to throwing a ball to walking up and down stairs, etc.. He ended up placing in the 8th percentile for that, but after looking at his other scores, the evaluators felt he should still qualify for services.

Since it took them awhile to review his results after his Gross Motor test (we hung out in the playroom for 1 1/2 hours waiting to find out if he qualified), and since Nate worked from home that morning so he could also watch Mason (Jefferson was at school) but had to go to a client site in the afternoon, I couldn't wait around all day, so they went over the results with me and sent me home and had me come back a couple days later to get my copies and sign the paperwork which took a bit longer to type up.

So the areas that qualified him are Fine and Gross Motor, Behavior, and Socialization. He starts in August and will go 4 days a week.