Dysgraphia at School, Decoded

Your child talks and reads at grade level, but almost nothing gets onto the page. The report card says messy, rushed, incomplete. Twenty minutes of written homework takes two hours and ends in tears, and the advice from school is the same each time: he just needs to try harder. Maybe an occupational therapist looked and said he is fine; maybe a private report says dysgraphia and the school has said it does not test for that. This guide explains how the federal rules work at each of those moments, the way a good advocate would on the phone: steady, specific, and in order.

Dysgraphia is the everyday word; the law's category is specific learning disability, its one writing area is written expression, and the regulation draws one line that decides where help comes from: a writing problem that is mainly in the hand is outside that category and not outside help. This guide decodes the path on both sides of that line: what a writing disability is and what the law calls it; the instruction question behind try harder, screening, and intervention, and how to ask for the evaluation in writing, naming written expression and motor abilities; what the writing evaluation must cover, which tests you will see on the report, and the rule that a test has to measure what your child knows rather than his handwriting; how the eligibility group decides, what its written determination must say, and what a private diagnosis does and does not do; what an IEP can hold for writing, from the baseline to specially designed instruction, occupational therapy and the services page; accommodations by task, the keyboard and speech-to-text question, and how assistive technology gets decided; the Section 504 route for a writing disability; and ten states' own rules, read from their own statutes, regulations and test manuals. Every timeline, right and requirement carries its citation in the sentence where you read it, so you can check each one yourself. Written for the United States special education system under IDEA and Section 504.

Who it is for: a parent, usually a mother, of a school-age child who cannot get it onto paper, who has been told to try harder, that the handwriting is fine, that the district does not test for dysgraphia, that a laptop is not an option, or that he passes so nothing is wrong. Your alternative is an educational advocate at 100 to 300 dollars an hour. This guide costs less than a quarter of one of those hours.

61 pages, US Letter, instant digital download (PDF). Print the worksheets and the letters as many times as you need.