Westborough Community Advocate

Dr. Ann Helmus Addresses Spedpac

By Catie Foertsch, Community Reporter

Westborough 4/2/07 - The Special Education Parents Advisory Council (SPEDPAC) brought Dr. Ann Helmus to the Mill Pond School auditorium March 16 to speak to more than 70 parents from Westborough, Grafton, Sturbridge and other towns about diagnostic testing and assessment for children who are having difficulty in school.

Helmus, a pediatric neuropsychologist and director of NESCA (Neuropsychology & Education Services for Children & Adolescents) in Newton, told parents that while the assumption can be that children who are having difficulty in school are lazy, undisciplined or unmotivated, that is often not correct. “Most kids want to do what other kids are doing and there are reasons why they're not,” she said. Finding those reasons is the purpose of testing and assessment, Helmus said.

For children who are having a hard time paying attention in class, the automatic assumption by parents and teachers is often that the child has attention deficit disorder (ADD) and needs a medication such as Ritalin. But, Helmus said, medication will not help if the problem looks like ADD but in fact is something else. Helmus said she’s evaluated kids whose attention problems stemmed from a variety of sources, including emotional or psychological stress, problems processing language, Tourette’s Disorder, chronic pain and intellectual giftedness that caused severe boredom.

Another common problem occurs when parents see issues at home, such as inability to concentrate, but teachers don't see the same issues and say the child is doing fine. The cause can be that the child does well in a very structured environment but not well with less structure, and home is much less structured than school. Asked by a parent about the role of intuition, which can give parents a “gut feeling” that something is not right even though a doctor or teacher says everything’s fine, Helmus stressed the importance of trusting those feelings and finding a doctor who listens.

She advised against a “wait and see” approach, where parents may be told to wait a year and see if a problem goes away, because some issues have a narrow window of opportunity to help the child. If parents wait, the brain may develop past the point where the child can learn to overcome the difficulty.

Testing and Assessment

Testing, Helmus said, involves administering tests and gathering scores, while assessment uses test scores as a tool to figure out what's going on with a child. Assessment also relies on direct observation of the child, as he or she works on the tests or in the classroom. Using test data as a tool to help understand the child is very important, while administering a battery of tests for the sake of generating test data is not helpful, because test scores by themselves are meaningless, Helmus said. At some testing sites, tests are administered by a technician, who reports the results to the senior neuropsychologist, who interprets the data. While that practice is not wrong, Helmus said, it doesn't have the richness it could have if the neuropsychologist administered the tests, because the testing situation gives an invaluable opportunity to observe and get to know the child.

The goal of a good assessment is a clear, understandable report that explains the reasons the child is having difficulty. “One of the things that distresses me is that in some reports you’ll see detailed information but it’s not pulled together and you still don't know why he’s failing math,” Helmus said. “The assessment report should also state in very clear terms exactly what services the child needs, why he needs them, who would provide them, how often and where. This is helpful to schools because there’s no equivocation. It’s very clear what’s recommended. And it helps parents advocate for their child," Helmus said.

Helmus also advised parents who decide to have their children assessed to find a neuropsychologist who was willing to attend school meetings to explain the assessment and advocate for the child’s needs, and who was also willing to participate in mediation or a court hearing, if the school district contested the recommendations.