Lane's Story
One Gately student and his family share their story with columnist Margie Boule, of The Oregonian.
Nobody's kid likes going to school, you tell yourself. So you force your child to walk through those doors each morning. You ignore the pleas, the stomachaches, the tantrums.
But Lana and Greg Traynor couldn't ignore them anymore. Their son, Lane, midway through sixth grade in an excellent private school in Portland, hated going to school.
"I knew from the get-go Lane was struggling," says Lana, an attorney who specializes in education-related issues. "His learning style was not your traditional learning style. The teachers were great with him. But he was struggling, and so anxious about going to school."
Lane was very bright, but he didn't talk, or write, as quickly as other kids in his class.
"He's a very visual learner, very artistic," Lana says. "He's a multisensory learner, a hands-on, tactile kind of guy. That's how he learns. But that's not how traditional schools teach kids.
"By the time he got to sixth grade, he was so stressed out he didn't want to go to school."
Lane's dad, Greg, who runs a family business, says, "He got to the point where he was saying, 'I don't want to go there. It is not fun. I give up.' And there were problems on the playground." Lane was not a rough, tough, competitive boy. He went to school under protest, wearing sweatshirts with the hoods always up.
Lana and Greg tried to help their son. They encouraged his talent, saw he got art lessons. Greg took him fishing, which Lane loved. They took him to experts, who provided an official diagnosis: Lane has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, with learning challenges, low confidence and anxiety, Lana says. They put him on medication, which helped.
"But I had to have the exact right amount of the medicine," says Lane, who is 14 now. "And it changed quite frequently during my last years at my previous school."...