Originally Posted by sh22
Sorry to binge-post, but our IEP meeting is next week...

The school psychologist says they don't do the GAI score. What is the best response? An someone recommend the best (short) "official" explanation or document to support use of the GAI?

Thanks so much!!

Is the purpose of the IEP meeting to identify your dd as gifted so she has access to honors or gifted programs at the high school, to identify remediation and accommodations that will assist with the challenges she has, or both? If access to gifted programming isn't an issue (ie, doesn't require id as gifted by the school), I wouldn't worry about having the GAI calculation. I'd focus instead on the areas in which her achievement test scores don't sync with what you would expect from her ability (WISC) scores, and as EmmaL suggested, try to provide your own examples of specific areas where she is struggling. Please note that I'm not a professional, just a parent of a 2e student - but fwiw when advocating with our school district it helped me tremendously to fill in with specific examples of how our ds' challenges impacted the equivalent of work he would be tasked with doing in the classroom. You mentioned your dd has trouble retaining math lessons - you can recreate this at home by working through a specific lesson with her from her school curriculum, record her responses and ability to understand at the time of the lesson, document your notes and date - then one week later ask her to complete a few problems pulled from this lesson, mark them yourself, date it. Things like that - all of which may be too late to do for this IEP meeting, but something to consider in the future if you find the school is not seeing that there is an issue.

There may also be a local parents advocate group that can help you understand what your rights are in your specific school district - although IEPs and 504 plans are pare of Federal programs it can help tremendously to understand how your own school district works, what their time frame and resources are, and what other parents' experience has been when seeking similar assistance from the school. I found our local group by googling... but that was years ago, and at this point in time this same advocates group is listed on our school district's special ed website as a resource.

You mentioned your dd is 14 - it would also likely be helpful to have her voice included in the IEP meeting, which can happen even if she's not present.

If the school district doesn't provide any further testing, it may be helpful to you (focusing not on school, but on helping your dd understand her challenges as well as strengths) to seek a neuropsychologist evaluation - the neuropsychology eval will include testing that can further determine *why* there are differences in achievement vs ability scores and help understand what is at the root of the variability in WISC scores. This was all extremely valuable information for us as parents and also for our ds. It didn't necessarily help with advocating at school when teachers and staff didn't want to hear about it, but it helped us understand what was really going on, how to remediate where possible, and how to work around challenges that would always be present.

Best wishes,

polarbear