My daughter is on the honor roll, but she has a disability.
She has a brain injury, epilepsy, apraxia of speech and reading/writing problems, short term memory problems, and some other auditory processing problems.
She is great in math, but needs help in other areas.
The epilepsy is new this year, so she has accomodation to be able to listen to books on tape instead of reading them. It helps a lot.
She does about 2 hours of homework each nigh and she’s only in 5th grade. She workds much harder to get A’s then her brother and sister.
Having a disability doesn’t mean that you can’t get A’s. It does mean that you learn differently and need to be taught things differently.
I’m not talking about kids with real serious issues, like your daughter. I know there are kids out there with genuine needs and I have no problem at all helping them.
I know that injuries don’t always affect intelligence. That’s a whole different issue. Some of the kids in the resource program have different needs. Some are clearly mentally handicapped, one has Down Syndrome and is quite bright, some are refugee kids who have been adopted and are in the process of learning English, a very few have fine motor control issues which makes writing very tedious for them. That accounts for less than half.
We’re somewhat new to this community, but most everyone else has grown up together here and have known each other since before kindergarten. They know how smart each other is and know very well what kind of grades they’d be capable of getting. They KNOW who’s playing the system and who’s not.