Rayden-Lee was born with a rare life threatening disorder called Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia and had to date been hospitalised 31 times. This disorder took a huge toll on his development as a child. He was originally enrolled in Laerskool Hennopspark in 2015 for Grade 1, however, devine intervention was needed as by the middle of the 2nd term, he was unable to phonetically sound out letters, unable to spell three letter words, unable to read and was being left behind in class. He was completely demotivated because of the level of difficulty that schoolwork entailed. He was evaluated by several therapists and started attending a psychologist, speech therapist and occupational therapist.
During the 2nd term of Grade 2, I moved him to Laerskool Swartkop. His teacher recommended (actually she begged me) to please take him to Edublox for an evaluation. As I saw no harm in adding more support, I agreed.
The day that we went for the evaluation, Jolanda asked me to take a leap of faith and to enrol Rayden-Lee in the intensive 10 day program, as he would benefit more from the intensive therapy sessions than he would from just starting class. I closed my eyes, opened my wallet and made the payment. After the ten day session, we decided it best to enrol Rayden-Lee for two sessions a week for the next two years.
During the intial intensive 10 day program — I remember a specific day (day 3 to be exact) — when Rayden-Lee came home with an A4 paper filled with three letter words and I couldn’t help but think that I had been duped out of so much money. With not much hope in my heart, I pointed to a word and asked him what it was.
“B – A –L… BAL” (An Afrikaans word)
I almost choked. Surely it was pure luck. I dropped to a word at the bottom of the page, and
“K – A – T… KAT” (An Afrikaans word)
I still couldn’t believe it, so I chose a random word in the middle of the page and lo and behold he nailed it! In three days, Jolanda had achieved what no one else could. I was ready to face the world again.
After the 10 day course, Rayden-Lee returned back to his new school and fell in with the rest of his class. At the end of the 2nd term his report marks had gone from only 1’s to a range of 1 – 3.
At the end of the third term, his marks ranged between 3 and 5. Unfortunately, Rayden-Lee was very sick during the 4th term and was excused from all assessments. The decision to make him repeat the grade in 2016 had already been made by the end of term 2. So we gave him a little break.
His results in 2016 so far have been as follows:
Term 1 – He had only two 7’s on his report and the remainder 6’s.
Term 2 – He had only two 6’s on his report and the remainder 7’s.
Term 3 – We went through a bit of an attitude change and his marks still remained in the region of 6 and 7, with the exception of a few 5’s. He was devasted when he saw the 5’s and realised that his attitude impacts his work significantly.
Jillian Pollard
Rayden-Lee’s report:
SCALE: 7. Outstanding achievement – 80 – 100% 6. Meritorious achievement – 70 – 79% 5. Substantial achievement – 60 – 69% 4. Adequate achievement – 50 – 59% 3. Moderate achievement – 40 – 49% 2. Elementary achievement – 30 – 39% 1. Not achieved - 0–29%
Jillian Pollard Rayden-Lee's mother
