It took me a few days to be able to write a semi-rational response to this...

In my experience, many schools are unwilling to provide appropriate services for anyone unless the parents advocate relentlessly, and often not even then, regardless of where on the intellectual spectrum a child falls. My son is rather dramatically 2E, and we homeschool in large part because it is just easier than having to take the district to court and fight constantly to get any accomodations for his disabilities or appropriate acceleration for his strengths.

It is a pervasive myth that students with disabilities have huge resources lavished on them and that they are generally getting an appropriate,individualized education.

It is likely that the parents of those two students went through the wringer to get an appropriate education for their children - and for all that, the education the children are getting still might not be appropriate: ESE programs are notorious for having the children placed in them fall further and further behind their age peers, when the whole point is supposed to be to provide intensive, targeted intruction to help them catch up.

The only reason many schools provide any ESE services at all to kids with disabilities is that the parents of kids with disabilities fought tooth and nail to get laws like the IDEA passed to force districts to educate their kids to at least a minimum level. While IDEA is the law of the land, it has never been fully funded, so only a fraction of the federal money that is supposed to be available to help districts provide services actually is, although they still have a legal mandate to provide a FAPE for children with disabilities. Full funding of the IDEA mandate would free up state and local education funds that could be used for gifted programs, so encouraging your congresspersons to support full IDEA funding could potentially help your district provide better services to the gifted children it should be serving.

If this is really something you feel strongly about, I recommend sharing "A Nation Deceived" with your local school board and your state and national senators and representatives, and joining state and national associations for the gifted and encouraging them to support state- or national-level legislation to codify a requirement for appropriate education services for gifted students.

Last edited by aculady; 03/06/12 01:25 PM. Reason: typo