School "asked" to see psycho-educational report

Parents Forum Learning Differences and Challenges - LD, ADHD
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<p>Can a private high school Admissions demand/blackmail you into showing your child's psycho-educational report?</p>

<p>On the application to a private high school we had disclosed our son's ADD diagnosis. His grades/SSATs are good and the application process/interviews/etc went smoothly, and the school had sent us a letter early on indicating that they do provide the accommodation we were seeking. Then we got a "request" from the admissions, which was clearly fishing to see if we had an official psycho-educational testing done without actually asking that question, and seemed to include a veiled threat. It basically said that we are NOT obligated to show them the report, but if we did not let them see it now, if admitted he will NOT be given any special accommodations. I felt like we had no choice at this point but to show the report. The end result is he was wait-listed. (By the way, this is not a highly ranked-school.)</p>

<p>Is it legal for them to ask to see this private information?
Can they reject you for having LD?
Can they deny accommodations when the child is clearly allowed them by law, but you choose not to let them see the report until after being admitted?</p>

<p>I see a lot of debates on whether to disclose or not to disclose LD in your application. I am now worried that we had our son tested in the first place at the suggestion of his middle school. If I had not mentioned LD in application, they would not have noticed it during the application process.</p>

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<p>They may well ask every single time so that they know up-front what they would be dealing with. Not all private schools are well set up for some learning differences. Much better for them to know now, and be prepared for your child, than for you and your child to find out later on that they just aren’t able to provide the environment and accommodations that allow him to perform to the best of his abilities.</p>

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<p>Yes, yes, and no, private-entity school is NOT required to provide LD accommodations.</p>

<p>Request is legitimate, and makes sense. There are no regulations requiring private schools to provide accommodations for learning disabilities. Some private schools provide certain accommodations for certain learning disabilities, but they’re not required to provide IEP-related accommodations, evaluations, etc. If parents are requesting a school’s consideration of their child’s learning disability, then school would be prudent to request documentation of educational testing that determined that disability exists. That documentation also contains recommended accommodations as part of diagnoses report. School can, and should, determine whether student is a “good fit”, and whatever accommidations are necessary, if any, can be accomplished with minimum disruption of school and classroom.</p>

<p>If your son was enrolling in a public school, then situation would be different but need for test data would be same.</p>

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<p>Thanks for replying, happymom and higgins!</p>

<p>I am new to this. It seems that if it was legal for a school to ask for the report, the school would have come out and asked for it. We told them upfront that my son may occasionally need X, and they said that they do allow it. If what’s in the report could be used in the admission decision, it could have been listed in the needed application materials. But it wasn’t. Instead they were very careful in their wording in several emails not to say that it is required, and even said we had the right NOT to show it.</p>

<p>I’ve started researching this, and this is what I am generally seeing for private colleges. It is not unreasonable to conclude that it should apply to private lower/high schools as well:</p>

<ul>
<li>Private institutions have to provide “reasonable” accommodations.</li>
<li>If you meet the essential requirements for admission, a school “may not deny your admission” simply because you have a disability.</li>
<li>You “do not have to inform” a school about your disability.</li>
<li>But, “once accepted for admission”, a student who wishes to receive accommodations for his or her disability must identify the disability.</li>
</ul>

<p>The above makes sense. It seems to me that the high school in question is weeding out students with ADD, etc. to make life easier for themselves. </p>

<p>To answer my own question, I would not disclose a child’s diagnosis until AFTER an acceptance to a school, college, etc. Then I would talk to them and determine if the school would be a good match for your student’s needs.</p>

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<p>Why would you want your child to attend a high school or college that did not want to accommodate your child’s learning disabilities? The school may not have the financial resources or the faculty trained to help the student advocate for accommodations, if that student is in high school for example, and you have wasted your time applying. Your high school counselor can explain your child’s LD in his letter of recommendation. That would explain gaps in the transcript (if your child had a foreign language waiver for example) By college, the student should be able to advocate for his or herself, but I have found that even at colleges that provide accommodations, sometimes a random professor will get lazy and not accommodate. Then the student needs to have an administrator on his/her side and go in and ask for the accommodations again. You have to realize that you are looking for a high school or college that is a good fit for your child. You need a school that is “enlightened”. Don’t waste your time on the others. I have two children with LD, one in college and one off to college next year and he was upfront with both.</p>

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<p>I think the issue here was that the high school does provide the accommodations needed by the OP’s child, and the OP’s child had already demonstrated through his ISEE’s and grades, that he was a viable candidate for that school. The school, after being alerted that the OP’s child had an LD when the OP inquired about accommodations, then told the OP that while the accommodations were available, they would only be given if the student’s medical records were provided during the admissions process. Which is not OK, and may not be consistent with the law.</p>

<p>Of course, no one wants his kid in an environment that is hostile to his presence and his needs. But on the flip side, if there is an institution that the kid has good and specific reasons for wanting to attend and where the kid is capable of doing the work, to my mind it is not OK for the kid to be kept out as a function of the LD. </p>

<p>At the pre-college level, our hs was so good about it that I don’t want to say we “fought,” but we certainly did very time intensive and just plain intense advocacy to keep our kid there even though his accommodations were unusual for them. (Not unheard of, just unusual.) If the school had made his life miserable, it probably wouldn’t have been worth it, but he loved the place and was capable of doing very well there both socially and academically. So yeah, even if the administration had somehow changed and they hadn’t been as enthusiastic about supporting him, I would not have taken our marbles and gone home.</p>

<p>On the college level, assuming the college has a reasonable support office and the needed accommodations are available for students with medical documentation, I think that the issue of whether or not to reveal or be up front is a much trickier issue. If the student chooses to reveal, I think this should be his or her prerogative. But I’m not sure that the attitude of “if they don’t want my kid, the heck with them, there are plenty of other colleges” necessarily serves all LD students. What if there are a couple of particular colleges that are the student’s top choices for good reason and the colleges clearly have support offices that are doing their job. </p>

<p>I tremendously admire how kartwheelie, who has posted on other threads, has taken the bull by the horns and moved forward proactively to find herself schools that are an excellent fit, being very up front with the schools about her needs. But I also think that there are students whose approach is: I want this school; they have exactly the academic program I want; the accommodations I need are available there: I want admissions to judge me on my qualifications alone and not consider or even know about my LD in deciding whether to admit me.</p>

<p>My sense is that the OP and her S were in this latter category. Her S was qualified and it seemed quite squirrely of the school to demand his medical records in the course of admissions when there were academic records that showed he could do the work and was a competitive candidate. And the threat that no accommodations would be forthcoming unless those records were forked over during admissions must have felt like blackmail.</p>

<p>Obviously, the records have to be forked over once a student is admitted so the school has documentation that demonstrates what accommodations are needed. But how do you explain the school demanding the documentation while making the decision? It certainly appears that the student’s LD was going to be taken into account even though he had other records showing that he could do the work. And that does not seem right.</p>