You notice your son, John, has a hard time getting ready and prepared for school each morning. He forgets to bring home permission slips for activities and is always the last one out the door.

Meanwhile, John’s teacher also reports back that he is constantly disorganised, leaves paper everywhere and can’t get his bag packed up at the end of each school day.

As a parent you might assume your son is lazy and just easily distracted, but his teacher might see this as an organisational problem and suggest that John get a folder for his papers so he can be more prepared.

The truth is there may be another root cause to all these problems — and it’s the job of an educational therapist to get to the bottom of it.

“In this particular example there may be a deficiency in executive functioning skills,” explained Lindsey Lehman, of ABC Services. “And this is where Educational Therapy comes into play.

“We aren’t tutors, we don’t teach the material. We teach the skills the child needs in order to learn the material.

“In John’s case, an Educational Therapist would be able to make specific and effective recommendations to his parents, teachers, and to John himself in order to target and improve his executive functioning skills.

“This would translate to an improvement in many aspects of John’s life, and to his future development.”

Ms Lehman’s role as an educational therapist is to act as the ‘bridge’ between home and school, or any services or therapies the child is receiving. She works with children in a comfortable space to help them improve upon any number of skills necessary for development.

“Some children, for a variety of reasons, are shown to exhibit gaps in their earlier foundation skills, cognitive weaknesses, attention deficits, or poor executive functioning,” she explained.

“These deficits hinder the child’s ability to learn.

“When children are observed to struggle in school, it is typically because they haven’t adequately developed their mastery of certain fundamental skills and thus don’t have a proper foundation on which to build the additional layers of new skills.”

Ms Lehman was inspired to get into this line of work because of her two cousins, both of whom had special needs.

She said she witnessed both the struggles and the joys her family shared by having them in their life.

“I wanted not only to help children but to help their families as well,” she said.

“When you teach a child you aren’t just working in isolation, you are teaching their whole family unit, and in turn the community.

“The saying ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ rings true even today.”

Her role extends beyond just working with a child. She also shares those skills learned with the classroom teacher and the parents so they are fully equipped to aid in that child’s success.

She said parents have a particularly important role in the equation — seeing that they usually know their children better than anyone else.

That’s why ABC Speech-Language Pathology and The Learning Disabilities Association of Bermuda have decided to host a workshop to empower parents.

Entitled ‘Advocating For Your Child: What You Need To Know’, the workshop will be held this Saturday from 10am until noon.

“Parents will learn how to properly and effectively advocate for their child. We’ll cover everything from writing e-mails or notes, calling the teacher, how to ask for a meeting, and how to deal with administrators,” Ms Lehman said. “Whether it’s at school, at a camp or an after school programme; it’s about getting what they need.

“Often times parents feel like if they speak up they will end up ‘rocking the boat’ and that might translate into retaliation for their child. If done properly, this doesn’t happen.

“When a child’s needs are not being met, that child is likely to slip further and further behind and we want to help parents and schools work more effectively to prevent that from happening.”

She said parents will also be able to learn helpful “real-life tested” strategies that can be “immediately effective” for use at home.

There will also be time to discuss topical issues like how to prepare your child for academic transitions (primary into secondary); as well as information on social skills training, such as eye contact and conversational skills.

Ms Lehman said she hoped parents would walk away with more knowledge and confidence when advocating for their children; as well as a better understanding of how they can get the best overall experience for their children — academically, emotionally and socially.

ABC Services — which stands for Advancing Better Communication — is headed by speech-language pathologist Sally Ann Topley, who works alongside Ms Lehman to address overall communication development.

The parents workshop will be held this Saturday morning in the Mount Saint Agnes Academy Auditorium. Tickets, $30, can be purchased at www.bdatix.bm. For more information call ABC Services at 296-8255 with any questions; or e-mail them at abcservices@logic.bm.