Improving Distance Learning for Kids with ADHD and Organizational Challenges

So, it’s almost the third month of this bizarre world of online learning. You are adjusting to working from home, keeping a suddenly house-bound family fed all day long, and supporting your kids as they adapt to a “school” that lives entirely in their computer screen. That’s hard enough for many parents, even when their child doesn’t have a disability. But for those whose kids at the best of times have a hard time staying focused and organized, trying to help them keep up with remote learning can feel completely impossible. How do you know how to support them? And what even are their legal rights in this crazy time?

Currently, schools are offering a range of remote learning experiences. Children with attentional and organizational issues might be thriving in this environment, but many of them are floundering. You may be finding that without your constant vigilance, your child is falling into a deeper and deeper hole of missed and incomplete work. This post attempts to give you a framework for trying to salvage this frustrating new version of school for those kids.

If you are anything like me, you may be seeing endless lists of resources (such as this excellent one), with tons of suggestions for organizing your child’s day and supplementing their on-line assignments. Make a schedule! Make sure they get at least an hour of exercise a day! Suggest they take up a new hobby! But in reality, your child’s day may look a lot more like this than anything else:

• Wake up as late as possible so that your freelance parents can get at least a couple of hours to try to figure out how they are going to pay the bills for the next month with no work.

• Get up and eat a healthy breakfast of Eggo waffles. Definitely don't eat anything grown in the earth as it may be contaminated.

• Refuse to take a shower even though everyone says you smell.

• Start playing the Switch while also hopping on Instagram with friends to talk about all the amazing things your characters are doing in their virtual worlds.

• Sit down to do work after your mom reminds you 10 times. Look at google classroom and realize your to do list is still really long. You try to do math but remember that you have a big social studies project due and a video to watch for ELA. You flip between open tabs for a while and decide to see what your siblings are up to.

• Find your siblings and get into an argument. 

• Hop back on Instagram because it's been at least 20 minutes since you have "seen" your friends.

• Think about going outside but decide that the weather is nicer in your virtual world and you can make your character run which counts as exercise.

• Listen to dad yell at everyone to "shut up!" while he is on the phone with the bank.

• Eat a grilled cheese sandwich.

• Yell at your parents, "you don't understand how stressful this is!"

• Sit down to get to work and realize you need to look something up on YouTube, which leads you to watch a whole bunch of really cool videos.

• Hop back on Instagram to tell your friends what a busy day you had.

• Heat up a frozen pizza. Skip any vegetables since they may be contaminated.

• Realize the sun is setting and you can't go out for fresh air because the city is on curfew. Maybe tomorrow you can try again.

• Think about taking a shower before bed but decide to take one tomorrow instead.

• Realize there is no point in changing out of your PJ's because it is 9pm.

• Wait for dad to scream at you, "if you don't go to bed by midnight you will get Coronavirus!"

• It's 11:50 pm so you decide to get some work done.

• Do 5 min of math by logging onto Google classroom and counting the posts. Take another 5 minutes to read the posts.

• Get to bed at midnight, just in case dad is right.

How do you tell how much of the above behavior is just a “typical” response to our bizarre and unnatural situation, and how much of it is exacerbated by ADHD or executive functioning challenges? And to the extent that it is ADHD-related, what sorts of suggestions can you make to the school to take some of the burden off of you and your child? Most importantly, does your previously rights-protected child with an IEP even have any rights under the current situation? How do you make use of the accommodations you worked so hard to obtain on their IEP back when school existed outside of your house? 

According to New York State’s most recent Covid-related guidance, “school districts must ensure that, to the greatest extent possible, each student with a disability can be provided the special education and related services identified in the student’s individualized education program (IEP).” This document, along with similar ones from the federal education department, makes it clear that children with disabilities maintain their right to a free, appropriate public education (FAPE) so long as schools are operating remotely, so IEPs and 504 plans must be implemented during this period. 

So we know that IEPs and 504s should be followed to the greatest extent possible during this crisis. But what does that really mean for the vast numbers of children whose IEPs consist of placement in an inclusion or co-taught classroom (“ICT” in New York City)? Or students with 504 plans that provide a set of accommodations in the general education setting? How do you make sure these children have access to the curriculum without putting the entire burden on the parent?

IEPs mandating inclusion placements ensure that the child is in a classroom co-taught by a general education and special education teacher. The special education teacher is usually responsible for implementing the host of accommodations or modifications in the IEP that make up “specially designed instruction” for the child. These accommodations are anything that the child requires in order to mitigate the effects of his or her disability and access the curriculum and the general education environment. A child with ADHD is typically given things like preferential seating, on-task focusing prompts, breaks and various organizational supports, such as graphic organizers or note-taking guides. These strategies are individually designed to help children with attentional or organizational issues stay on track in the classroom, and are developed based on a child’s evaluation, classroom observations and input from parents and teachers.

Ideally, in order to make inclusion work in the online setting, these strategies would be translated to the remote environment as comprehensively as possible. They would be developed with input from parents and teachers and based on observations about what is and is not working in the remote setting. If specific attentional and/or organizational challenges have surfaced during remote learning that make it particularly difficult for your child to keep up with their work, the school should provide additional modifications designed to mitigate those challenges. 

Unfortunately though, many of the resources I have seen that purport to help parents deal with these challenges end up essentially putting the burden on parents rather than schools. While there is nothing wrong with offering parents assistance in supporting their child, parents are not trained special education teachers; they also may have multiple children with various needs, and (hopefully) have jobs to maintain. 

Remember that as long as schools are open, they are required to make reasonable accommodations for your child’s disability to make remote learning at least as successful (or not) as it is for children without disabilities. Making this happen may take some strategic advocacy on your part. In New York City, for example, schools are supposed to issue Remote Learning Plans for all children with IEPs, but the City has issued no guidance about how classroom accommodations are supposed to be adapted on these documents. However, the administration has repeatedly stated that parents are supposed to be offered the opportunity to provide input into these plans to make remote learning more successful. My understanding, however, is that these documents are being issued without parent input and rarely contain individualized adaptations of classroom strategies.

What I propose is that you ask the school for help figuring out additional strategies that could most help your child manage their schoolwork at the moment. These could be things like shortened assignments, daily check-ins with teachers and a small group of other students to plan out the strategy for getting work done, or an agreement that all work will be provided in a printable format so that an easily distracted child can work on paper rather than on-line (and turn in scanned assignments at the end of each day). The key is to come up with a set of simple adaptations that can compensate for executive functioning and attentional limitations that are exacerbated in the on-line, often overly self-directed learning environment. 

Once you have come up with your list of challenges and possible accommodations to address them, consider asking for them to be added to your child’s Remote Learning Plan (or whatever your district is calling them, assuming that they are doing some version of this). The key is to develop a coordinated approach used by all of your child’s teachers, which can essentially become part of your child’s IEP during this time. The point is to take some of the burden off of you by putting in place a set of individualized tweaks to the way distance learning is delivered, which attempt to address your child’s specific learning, attentional or organizational challenges. This approach also helps to make sure that your child’s disability does not make this extremely difficult period even harder.

None of this is a magic bullet, and may require repeated adjustments to get it right. The take home message is this: schools still are required to provide children with disabilities a free, appropriate public education in the remote setting. Although it may feel like you have become your child’s teacher, you are not! You are not required to take the entire burden of educating your child on yourself. Don’t be afraid to ask the school to modify its approach to virtual learning so that it is more in sync with your child’s learning needs. Your child’s rights are still protected in this strange new world - but accessing them can require strategic and persistent advocacy on your part. It will be worth the effort.