Being Your Child’s Advocate:
A Sample Letter to Send to Teachers and School Administrators

The start of the new school year is an opportune—and critical—time to communicate with your child’s team of teachers in order to ensure they are informed of specific challenges, needs, or behaviors related to your child. Below is a sample letter that you can use as a guide when you craft your own.

Dear Team,

Our son, JOEY, is a hard working student on your team.  He loves Nintendo, tennis, and fencing.  JOEY has a strong vocabulary and is excellent at connecting difficult concepts.  JOEY also has some challenges and is diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome (TS), Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) anxiety, learning disabilities (LD), and receptive and expressive language disorder. Some of the symptoms that you are likely to observe are:

Involuntary Vocalizations:

• Oh Duh
• Grunting clicking, clucking, repetitive noises,
• Inappropriate language (Fewer than 10% of people with TS have Coprolalia)

Involuntary Movements (or Tics):

• Head jerking backward
• Body jerking backward
• Entire body tensing and shaking slightly
• Tapping his face with hands
• Tapping objects

Please note that JOEY usually cannot talk or write when he is “ticcing.” Tics not only come and go, they also change.  JOEY will develop new tics throughout the year.  You may notice more tics associated with stress and excitement (this is true before holidays and vacations.)

Additional Symptoms Include:

• Difficulty following direction
• Difficulty focusing and staying on task
• Difficulty staying in chair
• Difficulty tracking written material

Accommodations

The single most important accommodation that you can provide is to demonstrate tolerance and acceptance by ignoring the tics. In addition, these accommodations are helpful as well:

• Provide more time on assignments and tests, with no timed tests
• Decrease workload
• Allow movement
• Make single step requests, as opposed to multi-step requests
• Redirect his attention to task
• Write down assignments – Please write the following week’s class plan on planner  so that we can review vocabulary and relevant text chapter over the weekend
• Ask the class to turn in their homework as a reminder
• Check that JOEY has correctly written the assignment in agenda
• Cover part of the paper’s assignments

JOEY is very sweet and polite.  He will want to please you, but will also look for ways to avoid doing his work.  Being firm, kind, and patient will help him succeed.  JOEY has an IEP; but we also wanted to write in order to offer this quick introduction and to let you know we look forward to working with you this year.  We know that you have a demanding job and hope to help you and JOEY have a successful year.

Please contact us with questions or if you need help.  Our contact information is: