So if I had to do it all over again, this is how I would do it.

The first thing to do is to get your kid an “Individualized Education Plan” (IEP). This is a written plan, created by the school and approved by you, that describes in a fair amount of detail what the school will do to “accommodate” your kid’s “disability”. (On the term “disability”, see this post.)

To get an IEP in place, start with a parent-teacher conference with your kid’s primary teacher, discuss the issues as you see them, and ask them how to get an IEP.  They might send you around to other meetings with other people, but many kids have IEPs, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get that process started. Key for the IEP is that your kid has a condition that is recognized as a disability, such as Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder (ADD/ADHD), something that many kids in the foster care system have.

Once you have that IEP in place, it means the school has extra resources available for your kid from a separate budget, and extra staff, so the teachers don’t necessarily need to do anything extra they won’t get paid for. It also means that you can go to any of your kid’s teachers, mention the IEP, and have a reasonable expectation that they will cooperate with you and the plan.

The central feature of the IEP is an annual meeting where the plan gets written or updated. “Everybody” involved in your kid’s teaching is supposed to be at that meeting, although in my experience, only about half of the teachers tend to show up. (Whether that is a problem for you, you need to decide.)There is also your kid’s case manager (appointed to write the IEP, and make sure it actually gets implemented), perhaps the school psychologist and a representative of the school district.

The typical IEP meeting is very boring and unproductive because it involves lots of forms of paper to fill out, and nobody ever talks about the real issues. I recommend you put your mark on the meeting, and instead use it to educate your kid’s teachers and to get them all on your side. You have them all in a room, and it’s the perfect opportunity. Interestingly, the teachers tend to be really interested in substantive information they hadn’t heard of before, so really good conversations are possible, which then translate into much better results for your kid in the classroom because the teachers had a chance to understand your kid!

The key message is “My (adopted, or foster) kid has had an awful past and had to go through things that no kid should ever have to go through. The ghosts of the past still haunt him every day. I want to work with you so we can help him as much as possible to still be as successful as possible in school.” You don’t need to share many details (and never share any details with anybody that your kid does not want you to share!), just enough that the teachers take notice that it cannot be business as usual with your kid; they need to do something extra.

If your kid is in therapy, involve your therapist. You can ask them to come to the IEP meeting, but that might not be needed. Instead, ask them to write a letter that outlines the diagnosis and the impact that it has on school.

Click here for an example for such a letter.

Then, be specific about what you think your kid needs. The above letter has some ideas that may or may not be appropriate for your kid. Be creative based on what you know does and does not work at home. Also, ask your kid. The more specific you are, the more likely it is that you will get it. Of course, you may have some ideas the school can’t implement, or won’t implement, for whatever reason, so you also need to be reasonable in what can realistically be accomplished. If any of the teachers have additional ideas, embrace those ideas. If an extra idea is any good, all the better, and if it is bad, nobody will continue doing it for long anyway.

Then, determine who is your kid’s champion an their school. It might be the case manager. Work on a good relationship with them and communicate frequently. Some other teachers will not be as interested or committed, and you need an ally in the school that can help you nudge others.

When bad things happen (bad grades, incidents etc …), immediately follow up with the champion and the teacher(s) in question. They are not superhuman; they will have forgotten about the accommodations, or something happened to prevented them from doing what needed doing that day. Don’t necessarily give them a hard time, just always put them on notice that you are there watching and alert and insist that your kid is getting the help they need. Also, always offer to discuss in person and any help you could provide. If you have new ideas, by all means, run them by your champion. While the IEP is supposed to be fixed for a year, nobody with whom you have a working alliance will reject new, good ideas.

Sometimes, some teacher will proactively resist. I recall that one IEP meeting where one teacher bluntly stated “I don’t believe any of this” (right after reading the letter from a PhD therapist). Fortunately, everybody else was on our side, and so the only result was that this particular teacher embarrassed himself in front of his peers. If so, ask the school to put your kid into the classroom of a different teacher. The school psychologist might also be a great ally.

Will all of this perform miracles? No. It’s still a normal school. But it can make life far less stressful for your student, and help them get much better grades while learning that they aren’t a “bad student”, but only one with an extra handicap, which isn’t one if the circumstances are right. This is a very powerful message to your kid in addition to the direct help with education.

Sometimes the press writes about foster kids with really difficult backgrounds accomplishing amazing things in school. Those kids probably exist, but there are very few of them, and I have no idea how they do it. It’s much more likely that your kid will have some kind of trouble in school at some point. So let’s continue under that assumption, which seems more realistic to me. (If not, just skip reading this post.)

What kind of trouble? For young kids, it could be “does not play nice”, or “does not obey instructions”, or “talks all the time” or even “walks out of the classroom when he pleases” or “throws a tantrum at the teacher twice a day”. Later, it will be “rarely turns in homework”, “is far behind in math and spelling”,  “is disruptive and keeps others from working”, “seems to have no interest in school”, “pays attention to everything except the teacher” and “does not do the required work at the required level.” In high school, it might be cutting school on a regular basis.

From what I can tell, none of this has anything to do with how intelligent your kid is. Your kid might be the smartest person in school, teachers included, and still fail at what looks like the simplest tasks. Why that is might be a big mystery. If you ask your kid, they might not be able to answer either. If they have an answer, it might be that they don’t do the work because they hate school and school is pointless (because … <<insert some implausible reasoning here, like, say, they are going to join the Foreign Legion>>). If so, don’t believe that for a second. Instead, it likely is that the school provides a kind of environment for learning that works for most kids, but that happens to be the opposite of what your kid needs. So your task as a parent is to change your kid’s learning environment into something that’s more suitable for them.

If the opportunitiy exists, try to find a school that knows how to make kids with a difficult past successful. I’m told that such schools exist, but from what I can tell, they are extremely rare (and likely too far away and possibly unaffordable). If you can’t find a school like that, do the second-best thing, which is to attempt to get your local school to provide the most suitable environment for your kid that they possibly can. It will most definitely make a difference. But that is easier said than done.

If you are residing in the United States, you are in luck, because the law in on your side. (I don’t know about other countries.) The Americans With Disabilities Act requires schools to provide what they call “accommodations” so that disabled kids can have a school experience that is as close as the one of a non-disabled kid. That’s why they have wheel chair ramps everywhere. But your kid is not in a wheel chair, you say? The good news is that doesn’t matter! The law talks about any kind of disability, including a mental or emotional one. This means that if your kid sees a therapist on a regular basis, bingo, the school has to provide “accommodations”.

(A word about the term “disability” is in order. I don’t think of my kids having any kind of “disability”. They have had a difficult past that reaches out to them almost every day, and still makes their lives harder almost every day. But I don’t think of it as a disability. However, I do go to their school and wave the word “disability” around. Why? Because the law says “we shall call this and that by the name ‘disability'”, and when I talk to the teachers, I use the word “disability” like it is typically used with the Americans with Disabilities Act. I would have used a different words if I had written that law, but I didn’t. So if you say “disability” with your school that does not mean you think your kid is “disabled”, only that this law applies to your kid.)

But regardless what some law or other says, there is got to be a will by the school to implement it for your kid. Otherwise you will have to sue, and you really don’t want to do this, because you won’t get what you want anyway before your kid gets too old, the teachers and principals will hate you and your kid even if you win, and you much rather focus your time and attention on your kid instead of lawsuits.

The trick is to build a “working alliance” with your kid’s teachers. Almost all teachers originally got into teaching because they actually want to do something good for kids, so even if a teacher has become old and cynical, that desire likely is still there somewhere. It is your task to find it, connect to it, be very specific about what help you think your kid needs, and then help the teachers provide it. As unlikely as it sounds, most teachers do not understand the first thing about kids with a difficult past (judging from the dozens of teachers we have interacted with over the years in several different schools). So you need to teach them, and hold their hand if needed once they try out this new thing that they have never done before. Another reason why “working alliance” works much better than a confrontational approach.

In the next post, I’ll be specific about how to do this.