Education

The news hit like a tornado in April: FamilyConnections, arguably the best-known family assistance nonprofit in Austin, would shut its doors.

Effective immediately.

The reason? Suspected fraud.

A real tornado could not have been any more devastating.

Overnight, more than 30 employees lost their jobs and parents throughout Austin lost a resource that had provided them with education, assistance, and camaraderie for nearly two decades.

If anyone should have noticed her daughter had a learning disorder, Liz Green figured it would have been her. As a kindergarten teacher, she had been specifically trained to spot learning difficulties. But since her daughter, Hayleigh, was an excellent student and an enthusiastic reader, the subtle clues went unnoticed.

“Each night we read, Hayleigh made more and more substitution errors,” she says. “She read ‘rampant’ for ‘repellant’ and ‘habitat’ for ‘hatchery’.”

It didn’t make any sense. Ms. Green asked her daughter’s teachers about the errors, but nobody seemed particularly concerned. Until second grade.

When Ryan Voldstad was a toddler, he’d pick up a badminton racket and pretend it was a guitar. Weekdays would find him performing impromptu concerts for his friends at daycare, serenading them with his own rendition of “Little Bunny Fu Fu.” By second grade, it became apparent Ryan should play an instrument, so his parents enrolled in him in Austin’s Childbloom Guitar Center — a move they say changed both his, and the entire family’s, lives.

When Susan and her husband saw their son’s first report card, they were shocked: a string of Bs and Cs littered the page.

I just found out that my daughter’s school isn’t making Adequate Yearly Progress as defined by the No Child Left Behind Act.
This is somewhat of a shock, given that the school routinely ranks among the top in the state.
Confused, and more than a little concerned, I started digging for information. What I found was, frankly, even more puzzling.
It seems that, overall, the school’s students did just fine on the test—indeed, they scored roughly15% above the state average on all standards. So how in the world did they end-up sanctioned by the feds?

A meeting between you and your child’s teacher can be a powerful tool for helping your child succeed in school.