Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Funding and Ritalin


Well, it seems not even the CEO know what they are doing when it comes to funding. Several weeks ago the VP at Mr 7's school told me Mr 7 was up for funding renewal in October this year and new reports would be needed. Having just completed and handed over a CELF report in February I asked if that report would suffice if an addendum was included. No,.. new reports were needed apparently...GREAT, the last one took up 5 therapy sessions so there went Term 3 speech out the window unless we took on extra sessions and alternated between one therapy session and one testing for the whole term. Mr 7's S/P could not understand it and we tried to find out what reports they needed as the last test was valid for two years after the test date. And lo and behold, the CEO now concurs that Mr 7 has ongoing funding until 2010. Not that I can complain but it would've been nice if the criteria is somewhere accessible for all, when I asked the VP about this; he admitted it was not anywhere or on any guideline format. Mr 7 is doing great guns and is now in reading recovery also. His last visit to his pediatrician came as a bit of a shock as she states we are doing all we can fro him with therapies, speech, classroom assistance and such, he's been in formal education for over 18 month now but his concentration levels have not increased ( if fact his aide was away for several weeks and noted on her return that his concentration seems to have lessened) His pediatrician suggested a well know drug to help increase his concentration levels and for the first time ever mentioned ADHD as a possible diagnosis. Interesting. I have read all the associated hype and concern about this drug and we have agreed to a one month trial and if he shows any of the many side effects, he's off it because it is not worth his well being for an extra 10 minutes of concentration. This was a hard decision to make and will be made even harder if he continues to show change as he has being doing; because then we will be looking at long term use of it. Devil and the deep ,blue sea time.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Its important to know that a lot of people abuse Ritalin and that its not just as simple as knowing "drug to help increase his concentration levels"