Originally Posted by Pemberley
Fourth everyone tells me over and over that all colleges will offer accommodations as long as DD advocates for herself. I don’t feel it’s a good idea to drop her in on her own without appropriate scaffolding though. Again I’m hoping a transition or college placement specialist who has a background in special needs would help navigate the process so she can be set up for success.

I am not in the US, so I can't speak to the US colleges. But where I am, I was repeatedly told that universities are so much better than schools at accommodations, it would be easier once she actually got there... I believed this to an extent. I trusted we would not have to work quite so hard. But I certainly expected to need to advocate carefully and was concerned about our child suddenly having to do it all on their own, when we'd fought all the battles at school.

I helped her fill out the online form to start the application process (ie "Oh that box means they want a copy of this report"). And I went to her first meeting as a support person and let her run it. I did add a few comments with background information once or twice (maybe she didn't recognise a term for a support she did use at highschool, etc). But mostly I sat back and tried not to fall of my chair in shock.

EVERYTHING she had had at school, without a single question. They checked she had appropriate professional reports to support those requests and that was it, TICK! And then... "OH, what about adaptive formatting? How would you like your tests and exams laid out? Do you want a special font? Do you need X? Y? Z? What if I set up a meeting with a member of our formatting team? You really should meet them at least once. And we can do this, and we can do that..."

It really makes no sense at all to me, that supports we had to fight tooth and nail for, let alone things that there is NO WAY we could have gotten for the little girl whose giftedness was utterly overwhelmed by her disabilities... are suddenly falling from the sky only AFTER she's reached the point that she doesn't need most of them. Things I had never heard of, supports I had never imagined... That we didn't ask for.

"Are you really sure you just need extra time and typing? You can come back and ask for other things if you have any problems!!"... It is so-freaking-hard to get extra time and typing provisions for highschool... and uni is worried it's not enough and really they should be doing all this extra great stuff that they know how to do... It's surreal.

More than once I have had professionals comment that kids that were as behind as she was don't catch up, they just get further and further behind. She caught up, then she got ahead. That's because she's gifted, not just LD, it's also because she worked so hard, and so did I, with her and for her. WHY is it so hard at school and so easy at uni?